This sounds obvious but most people don't actually do it. If you're waiting on something time-sensitive, like a job offer, an apartment application decision, a medical result, whatever, create a filter or rule in your email client that moves that sender's address to a specific folder and triggers a desktop notification.
The reason this works better than just checking your inbox is that inbox refreshing creates this background anxiety loop where every time you open your email and it's not there yet you get a small hit of disappointment. Do that thirty times in a day and it quietly drains you in a way you don't really notice until you're done with whatever you were waiting for.
With a filter and a proper notification you know you will hear when it arrives. You can actually close the tab and work on something else without that low level pull to check again in ten minutes. Most email clients let you do this pretty easily. In Gmail it's a filter with a specific from address and a label plus notifications for that label. In Outlook its a rule that moves the message and triggers an alert. Takes maybe three minutes to set up.
I started doing this after a particularly bad week of waiting on a job decision and checking my email probably 40 times a day. Set up the filter and genuinely forgot to check for hours at a time because I knew I'd be told when it mattered.
Small thing but it actually changed how I experienced waiting for news.