I heard back from several friends today about the election stress issues they've been having.
One friend has been doing some heavy volunteer polling work, and it sounds like she keeps right on polling, even after she falls asleep. Makes for a restless night.
Another friend said she dreamt that she dropped her absentee ballot in the mailbox and the mailbox grew teeth and ate it.
I had to do a little checking. One newspaper labels it, "Pre-Election Anxiety Disorder." You could abbreviate it as PEAD. As in, "I'm PEAD off right now!" The article describes it thusly:
Americans are in the grip of a monster case of Pre-Election Anxiety Disorder. No one is talking about voter apathy anymore, because the opposite is more likely the case. People care too much. They're losing sleep. They're having bad dreams about unfavorable tracking polls.
PEAD worsens as Election Day approaches and it's a 50-50 country and there's a war going on and people are dying and the talking heads are howling and the polls come firing at your head like fastballs. It's too close to call, too close, too close, we know the whole thing could pivot with the slightest breeze, that nothing is too trivial now, that even the slightest verbal gaffe by a candidate or his wife or one of the daughters could have a butterfly effect on world history.
Yeah, sounds about right.