What the Middle Ages can teach us about preventing burnout

Stress and mental exhaustion aren't new – in medieval times, they were prevalent. And the wisdom of the Middle Ages about how to deal with burnout still rings surprisingly true today.

The symptoms, John Cassian noted, were always the same. Weariness and hopelessness, a longing to be anywhere but work, and brain fog – "a kind of unreasonable confusion of mind" that left his colleagues feeling idle and useless and longing for the "solace of sleep".

If you've ever suffered burnout, exhaustion or depression, you might be familiar with at least some of these feelings, and you may assume that these afflictions are unique to the pressures of the 21st Century. But Cassian was writing in the 5th Century AD, and his intended audience were not modern-day executives, but early Christians who had become exhausted by their spiritual labours.

Could such accounts shine a light on our modern malaise, and even suggest a cure? That's the argument of historian Peter Jones's new book, Self-Help from the Middle Ages: A Journey into the Medieval Mind, which offers a fascinating glimpse into the ways that "therapist priests" – Jones's term – would guide their flocks out of spiritual anguish.

His research reveals just how common feelings of exhaustion have been throughout history – a recognition that may itself provide comfort for any of us facing a dark night of the soul. "There's so much wisdom in the Middle Ages," Jones says. We've already seen a proliferation of "lifestyle philosophy" books mining the works of the ancient Stoics, after all – maybe it's high time to take a leaf out of some medieval manuscripts.

Jones was inspired to write the book after his own crisis – the "coldest winter of my life". For reasons that he still finds hard to fathom, he had accepted a role as Chair of History at the University of Tyumen in Siberia. The temperatures were so low that he lost all feeling in his legs after spending just 20 minutes outside. He was struggling with the language and desperately missing his family in Dublin. "I was supposed to be researching and planning my lessons, to be getting on with my life," he writes. "But I couldn't bring myself to do anything at all."

As he started formulating a new course on the Seven Deadly Sins, however, he started reading echoes of his own unhappiness in the medieval accounts that he was studying."You see that they went through exactly the same things that we do," he says. "The feelings have always been the same, and people have had the same crises."

The Deadly Sins, Jones explains, do not appear in the bible but were formulated by early Christian thinkers such as Cassian. They were then refined by Pope Gregory the Great, who – as Jones writes in his book – "thought they would be the perfect tool for mapping out the troubles of the mind". This framework "ordering and processing all thoughts" comprised: Pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony and lust.

By the 13th Century, a series of popular manuals had emerged to guide the priest therapists in the best ways to help their........

© BBC