In this blog series, Ifeoma Akobi, doctoral candidate at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, Indianaopolis, reflects on her time with the Sleeping Well in the Early Modern World project as a visiting scholar. In this second post, Ifeoma explores the connections between the work of the project and her own work on sustained wellbeing. 

Sleeping Well at Ordsall Hall

In my last post, I mentioned my visit to Ordsall Hall as one of the highlights of my trip. During my visit, I discovered the public-facing side of the Sleeping Well project, ‘Sleeping Well at Ordsall Hall’. Over the course of my stay, Dr Anna Fielding and the Ordsall Hall team held several workshops involving ‘sleepy’ plants which were available to the public. It was a pleasure to see people from various backgrounds, including parents and young children, exploring and preparing historical sleep recipes and remedies. From my observations, as well as the testimonials on their site, the mix of history and creativity at the events were a success. Below are some of the remarks:

• ‘More like this – crafts for wellbeing with an educational spin.’
• ‘Enjoyed learning about this practically. Enjoyed mind body connection.’
• I loved the practical aspect. Experimental learning also calmed me down.’
• ‘Great session. Informative, calming and fun.’

Sleeping Well and Self-care

As I looked over the feedback, I made connections to my research on burnout and self-care. I thought about the definitions of self-care I had read. I also questioned whether people had always connected self-care to emotional, mental, and physical well-being. Archival data from the 17th and 18^th centuries reveal that this was not always the case. In England and the U.S.A., people associated self-care with moral-spiritual discipline, and physical-spiritual balance, respectively. The Puritans viewed sleep as a moral necessity, not for indulgence or neglect. Rising early, praying during the night, and avoiding idleness were part of a spiritual ritual, not a wellness checklist. Similarly, colonial Americans had a pragmatic approach to sleep. Rest was important, but more as a preparation for labour than as a means of achieving emotional well-being. Families often shared beds, sleep came in segments, and no one had a smartwatch telling them they were yet to achieve 85% sleep efficiency. From its embeddedness within communal, religious, and moral domains of care, sleep has evolved into a key element of individual health responsibility and self-optimization. These shifts in societal norms, medical knowledge, and economic structures have transformed sleep from a culturally-supported necessity to an initiative-taking act of self-regulation.

Sleeping Well and Burnout

The shifts in the meaning of self-care are associated with changes in the relationship between sleep and self-care. Today, self-care is broadly defined as the actions that individuals take to maintain health and well-being. Sleep, as one of the foundational pillars of health, now occupies a vital role in self-care routines. Sleep is also an area of concern in burnout scholarship. Research shows a two-way relationship between burnout and sleep quality, where burnout can lead to poor sleep, and sleep deprivation can result in increased burnout. The World Health Organization defines burnout as a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by prolonged stress, particularly in the workplace (WHO (ICD-11), 2019). Historically, Herbert Freudenberger scientifically named burnout and introduced the term “burnout” into the research vocabulary in 1974. He defined it as the loss of motivation, increasing sense of emotional exhaustion, and cynicism he noticed among volunteers working at a free clinic in New York City (Freudenberger, 1974). So, he used the term to describe the mental state of health care volunteers who were showing side effects such as emotional depletion and loss of inspiration. Additionally, he included the neglect of one’s needs as one of the twelve stages of burnout. Similarly, Christina Malach and her colleagues described burnout as characterized by emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced personal accomplishment or professional efficacy (Maslach et al., 1997). As a pharmacist and nonprofit scholar, these early roots of burnout in the nonprofit sector point to systemic factors behind the prevalence of burnout in the sector, hence the need for my research on systemic and sustainable self-care solutions like sleeping well.

Sleeping Well and Sustained Well-being

In my recent study of a subset of nonprofit workers, I found that quality sleep acts as a buffer against burnout at the personal level. But my work does not stop there. My findings indicate that the historical frameworks of communal, spiritual, and moral life still have a place in contemporary self-care and well-being. For most of human history, people did not worry as much about whether their sleep was good enough but embraced sleep patterns within the wider scope of their spiritual, social, and moral life. Although they did not track their REM cycles, they curated bedtime rituals and optimized their nights just as they did their days. Therefore, this fixation on sleep as something to manage, measure, and perfect is not a distinctly modern idea. It is also a practice that has both advantages and disadvantages. On the upside, we know more about the links between sleep and mental health than ever before. We have come a long way from when people made early connections between sleep and the nervous system (Handley, 2016). Today, therapies like CBT-I (cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia) are helping people reclaim rest without relying on medication. But there is also a drawback: once sleep becomes another metric to master, it creates pressure. Some people now suffer from “orthosomnia” a condition where a strong focus on sleep quality keeps them awake. Through my research, I aim to fill a gap in today’s sleep advice by emphasizing its historical and social contexts. I recognize that stable, healthy conditions for restful sleep are not accessible to everyone due to factors such as poverty, shift work, frequent travel, housing insecurity, and stress. These are some of the reasons why I seek a path to sleep and self-care that is not solely reliant on highly technological and medical methods. Historically, before the promotion of self-care as something one can buy, people understood rest as part of community life, moral order, or survival, rather than personal branding or consumerism. Sleep is an important part of self-care, but it is also a human act. And one of the best ways we can care for ourselves, and each other, is to reduce the pressure to perfect something our bodies already know how to do and embrace natural, more gentle ways of doing it.

References

Freudenberger, H. J. (1974). Staff burn‐out. Journal of Social Issues, 30(1), 159–165.

Handley, S. (2016). Sleep in early modern England. Yale University Press.

Maslach, C., Jackson, S. E., & Leiter, M. P. (1997). Maslach burnout inventory. Scarecrow Education.

WHO (ICD-11), W. H. Organization. (2019). Burnout: A syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11). https://www.who.int/classifications/icd/en/

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