My waiting period for the election results this time is limited to just 2-plus days because the polling in the constituency where I vote is set for June 1. But this time, the nation’s electorate as a whole has to wait anywhere from two days to six and a half weeks to find out the outcome. How excruciating is this kind of anxiety, I wonder? Well, Mother Jones’ editor-in-chief Clara Jeffery described the collective anxiety of the American electorate in the context of the 2020 US presidential elections by saying, “The entire country is awaiting a biopsy result.” Furthermore, although it takes a bit longer to count the ballots in the US, recall that no one had to wait more than six weeks for counting.

Yes, it can be stressful to wait for the results of an election, especially if you are more politically conscious than the average person. The stress or anxiety can be described in a variety of ways, though. For instance, Charlie Warzel wrote the following in a New York Times article on 2 November 2020, against the backdrop of the US presidential election, as people anxiously awaited the results: “Right now you probably feel like a spring that’s been tightly compressed under enormous weight. From the outside, it appears still. Inside it is coursing with intense potential (anxious!) energy just dying for release.”

Let’s hear it from someone who studies the psychology of waiting. She is Kate Sweeny, a psychology professor at the University of California, Riverside (UCR), in the USA. In a 2020 media interview, Professor Sweeny remarked, “I joked with my friends that I wished someone would, like, knock me over the head on election morning and wake me up when the decision is made.” But is everyone feeling the same level of anxiety? Perhaps not. There is some intriguing research that links anxiety to election results, mostly in an American setting. For instance, Sweeny’s research revealed that while many people were understandably scarred by the surprise results of the 2016........

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