So, you’ve applied for your Australian visa yesterday, last week, last month or maybe even years ago? And here you are, still waiting for your visa to be processed. You’re checking the global processing times again and again only to get even more frustrated as to why you are still waiting for the Department to make a decision on your visa.
At this stage, you might even think: I don’t even care about the outcome any more, I just want to know! You’re checking Australian visa forums driving yourself crazy and becoming more and more anxious as the waiting continues.
The only good thing about your situation is 1) the fact that you’re not alone in this (thousands of others are waiting too) and 2) not hearing anything about your visa doesn’t mean anything bad. Sometimes no news is good news.
It’s normal for you to stress out and worry about your visa outcome. It can be a life changing decision and so it might not come as a surprise that science has in fact proven that waiting for uncertain news provokes more anxiety amongst us than facing unequivocally bad news, including news of cancer (see Waiting for a breast biopsy. Psychosocial consequences and coping strategies by Lebel et al.).
It would be nice not to have to worry so much though. There has to be something you can do about it, right? Right?
Luckily for you, there is actual research out there on how to survive this waiting period!
Dr. Kate Sweeny from the University of California has conducted research on what it means to “wait well”. In her research paper “Two Definitions of Waiting Well” she examines how a group of law graduates handles the waiting for their bar exam results.
Her findings show that while participants who suffered through the waiting period and were prone to anxiety and stress, also responded more productively to bad news and more joyfully to good news. These findings substantiate that while the waiting period is stressful, it may pay off once the news arrives. So if you are one of those worriers, it’s nice to hear that you will be able to handle either outcome well.
The study conducted by Sweeny et al. shows that those impatient, negative thinking, anxious ridden waiters amongst us have it easier when the news arrives, whether that be bad or good news. When the news is good, the worriers got a boost out of it and were filled with joy and when it was bad, they seemed to take it more productively and it didn’t pull them down too much.
- Make a mental checklist – Is there anything you can do to change the outcome? Is there anything you can submit, upload or change?
- Prepare yourself – If you can’t change the outcome, ask yourself if there is anything you can do to prepare for what’s coming? Can you reappeal the visa decision? Do you have other visa options? Talk to your migration agent about your concerns and find out what you can do.
- Manage your expectations – Be optimistic as long as you can and then embrace passivism at the moment of truth to prepare you for the worst. It’s okay and reasonable to worry and while generally being optimistic is better for you, research has shown that being negative can turn out to be a good thing too as mentioned above.
- Find your flow and play tetris– look for activities that fully absorb your attention and make the time fly by. Dr. Sweeny’s latest study shows that playing Tetris can help you with that! To achieve a “flow” (a term psychologists use to describe a state of mind that is so engaged it makes the rest of the world fall away and time pass faster), you have to be engaged in an activity that challenges you just enough, not too little and not too much to make you frustrated.
- Practice mindfulness – Being in the moment keeps you from fretting about the past or what might happen in the future. Sweeny’s research has shown that many strategies of how we deal with waiting anxiety have been proven to be ineffective at best. However, mindfulness helped people cope better with the uncertainty and also manage their expectations more effectively.
Now, it’s up to you to put these strategies into practice! If you need to check the processing times one more time, go ahead and do it now and then trust that everything will turn out just the way it’s meant to be. And if it isn’t, you can always contact us.
Research on Stress and Waiting
