The rest is history

Rest - both sleep and non-sleep - is essential to help our overstressed bodies and minds repair themselves. But many of us remain in a constant state of 'fight, flight or freeze'.

- NIKI BEZZANT

In the 1870s, American doctor Silas | elements of Mitchell's cures may have some Weir Mitchell came up with a new cure for a condition known as neurasthenia. This was a catch-all term for a range of mental and "nervous" symptoms, including fatigue, depression, anxiety, insomnia, migraines and "hysteria".

Mitchell's cure was gender dependent. His male patients were sent into the countryside for long stretches of vigorous exercise. Often, they were literally sent west, where they spent time horse riding, cattle roping, hunting and bonding with other men in the open air. Famous recipients of this cure included the poet Walt Whitman and future president Theodore Roosevelt.

Mitchell wrote that men with neurasthenia could benefit from "a sturdy contest with Nature". Nervous illness, he claimed, was feminising and therefore detrimental to men, making a strong man "like the average woman".

The cure for "nervous" women could not have been more different: total and complete rest. The "rest cure" involved a strict regimen of months of enforced bed rest, seclusion and a fatty, meat-based diet. The writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman described her experience of the cure in her 1892 story The Yellow Wallpaper, in which she documents in harrowing detail her worsening mental health and the hallucinations caused by her enforced time alone. Mitchell advised her, post-treatment (for what to modern eyes looks like postnatal depression), to "live as domestic a life as possible" and "never to touch pen, brush or pencil again". Virginia Woolf was forced to endure rest cures several times during her life.

Horrific medical misogyny aside, appeal in our fast-paced world 150 years later. There are plenty of stressed-out folk who happily pay to spend time at wilderness retreats or in cellphone-free isolation, meditating and being coached on how to clear their never-quiet minds.