Waiting for a priority date to become current — what actually helped the wait

Following up on the post here about the approval-to-green-card gap — wanted to share what actually made that waiting period easier, since it's a genuinely different kind of waiting than the petition-building phase (nothing to actively do, just time passing). What helped: understanding the visa bulletin's actual movement pattern for my category and country of birth well enough to have realistic expectations, rather than checking anxiously without real context for what the numbers meant. Once I understood roughly what forward movement per month looked like historically for my situation, the monthly check became informational rather than anxiety-inducing. What didn't help, and I'd warn against: obsessively cross-referencing forum speculation about bulletin movement predictions. There's a lot of guesswork that gets shared with more confidence than it deserves. I found the actual published bulletin data, understood the trend for my own category honestly, and tried to leave it at that rather than chasing predictions.