At first, I thought it was just my distraught friend’s reaction.

A couple of weeks ago, in the middle of her rant about the barrage of election news, she told me she had decided not to watch the returns tomorrow night.

Instead she planned to climb into bed, shut off her phone and take some cold medicine guaranteed to put her into a deep sleep. And she told her husband not to wake her. She didn’t want to know anything until the morning.

All that to avoid what promises to be a nail-biting night of watching the national vote tallies.

In the days following that conversation, I’ve heard from any number of friends and casual acquaintances that they, too, have been thinking about sleeping through the night to ensure a blackout of election news. No parsing exit poll data. No listening to political experts detail the voting patterns in Georgia or Pennsylvania. No manic switching between public radio, network TV and X feeds.

My friend and a lot of other Americans — including me — are caught in a tightening vise of election anxiety, especially amped up during these last months of the volatile presidential campaign. As Syracuse University Professor of Psychology Dr. Kevin Antshel told ABC News recently, “election stress and anxiety is very real.”

For a long time, I didn’t have a name for the low-level nagging apprehension I’ve been unable to shake.

Indiana University School of Medicine’s blog highlighted a 2023 study that linked political events to “negative emotions” and “declines in both psychological and physical well-being.” An earlier 2022 study from the University of Nevada, Reno, revealed “self-reported symptoms of anxiety and depression rose significantly around the 2020 election.”

What’s more, the Pew Research Center’s survey conducted in May of this year said about 6 in 10 American adults “already say they are worn out by so much coverage of the campaign and candidates.” They probably didn’t imagine it would be immeasurably worse now.

My friend and a lot of other Americans — including me — are caught in a tightening vise of election anxiety, especially amped up during these last months of the volatile presidential campaign.

Therapists are advising the election anxious to manage their exhaustion by limiting their daily consumption of political information. Almost six months ago, former avid news consumer Jay Papasan told the readers of his website, thetwentypercenter, that he was limiting his intake to two national newspapers — one leaning left, and one right — and he’s “managed to stay mostly informed without being needlessly triggered.”

How is it possible not to be triggered by this election that Americans know is consequential, what UMass politics professor Erin O’Brien calls “a fork in the road”? Each fork representing a fundamentally different direction for the country’s political future.

My friend’s overnight sleep plan will only bring her one night of relief. It’s clear now that there will be no final ballot tally after the polls close tomorrow.

Differing state rules will ensure a drawn-out process that might take days to resolve. She’ll awake to more of the uncertainty that sparks anxiety.

Focus on what you can control, the counselors advise — and make a plan but prepare to face the next chapter of raw emotions and tension. To paraphrase poet Robert Frost, we all have “miles to go before we sleep.”