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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Hedgehogs and bears may have fewer brain cells than us, but they know a thing or two about recuperation. In the northern hemisphere, they find a good place to curl up and conk out. Then they bounce back as soon as they wake up from hibernation, according to the biologists who are studying them with the hope of inducing a similar state in astronauts on long space missions.
We humans, of course, spend this time of year rushing manically between festivities. We try to ignore that ominous tickle in our throat we felt creeping up just as we switched on the out-of-office message. Even if we haven’t been felled by the nasty new flu strain, we might be feeling a bit weakened by the year catching up on us. So in this season when some other creatures burrow away, it’s worth reflecting on why we are so allergic to the concept of rest.
The Scottish GP Gavin Francis, in his book Recovery: The Lost Art Of Convalescence, urges us not to feel guilty about taking time to properly get over things, whether it’s illness, grief or disappointment. “Self-compassion,” he writes, is “a much-underrated virtue.” He argues that medicine has become too focused on crisis since the advent of antibiotics, and has lost sight of the more holistic approaches to mental and physical suffering that existed before the profusion of modern drugs. He and his clinic partners, having encountered too much burnout, each take a three-month sabbatical every few years.
Our current vogue for stoicism leaves little room to be refreshed. Modern society regards anything less than serious disease as a waste of time. We all long to move on, even from friends’ sufferings. “It’s great you’re better,” we say bullishly, almost as soon as someone has been discharged from hospital. “There are more fish in the sea,” we tell a friend after a break-up. These callous platitudes are perhaps our attempt to sidestep the knowledge that we are changed by our experiences.
Above all, we don’t know how to handle the curious middle period between “ill” and “well”, when we are past the crisis but not yet fully restored. The Germans call this “Genesungsphase”: the healing phase. Long Covid was a stark reminder that recovery takes time, and that we don’t always get back to where we started. Sufferers who tried to push through it — and I watched many who did — made themselves worse.
We used to know all this; 19th-century novels are full of ailing heroines wafting about in nightgowns, delicately sipping broth. A Wellcome Collection online exhibition about the history of convalescence shows how the well-off travelled far and wide to find sun and respite from the horrors of tuberculosis before antibiotics. It also illustrates the stunning profusion of convalescent homes built by the Victorians to fit Florence Nightingale’s prescription of light, air and nature. These elegant, sunny buildings are a world away from today’s clanging, soulless hospitals. You don’t rest in modern hospitals: for a start, they need your bed back. While it’s healthier to get away from infection, there are few equivalent homes today offering true respite except hospices. One result is that readmissions to hospital are higher than they ought to be.
It would help to be kinder. The American doctors Stephen Trzeciak and Anthony Mazzarelli have compiled multiple examples of how compassionate care makes a difference, in their book Compassionomics. In one study, HIV patients who answered yes to the question “does your physician know you as a person?” were more likely to go on taking their medication, and to have no viral load in their blood.
The support of family and friends may also be pivotal. After serious illness, the real challenges of convalescence often begin after leaving hospital. In a book written with neuropsychologist Gail Robinson, the journalists Allan Little and Sheena McDonald describe how he nursed her after a horrific traffic accident that changed the trajectory of both their lives. She had been a national TV star, he a foreign correspondent. They ended up getting married.
A less traumatic but still challenging period of change is “matrescence”, the physical and emotional process of becoming a mother. In the 1960s, women were often in hospital for a week after giving birth, with nurses looking after both baby and mother. Some western-born Chinese mothers still maintain the tradition of a month’s confinement. But most of us, in our fast-paced modern world, are rapidly ejected and expected to get on with it. A third of new mothers spend more than eight hours alone each day, according to a book by journalist Lucy Jones. They might be kinder to themselves, she argues, if it was understood that the first year of motherhood is a bumpy journey, full of ups and downs — like adolescence but far less talked about.
In the coming decade, it’s possible that astronauts will travel the galaxy in a state of induced torpor, with a reduced metabolic rate and low blood pressure. The message I have taken from the space agency studies is that creatures like hedgehogs and bears adapt their rest according to context. If it’s warm enough, in the southern hemisphere, they barely hibernate. In chillier climes they conk out for longer — perhaps especially if they’ve endured a year’s relentless news cycle. I’m taking my cue from them.