BBC Radio 4 has produced a documentary called Exhaustion: A History based on the research of Anna Katharina Schaffner. Anna Katharina is the Reader in Comparative Literature and Medical Humanities for the Department of Comparative Literature.

Are we really more exhausted today than we have ever been before? This programme sets out to discover a forgotten history of listlessness, burn-out and fatigue.

A couple of years ago, I noticed there was a really extreme increase in reports about stress and exhaustion,” Anna explains in the programme, “I found, to my great surprise, that exhaustion really is a ubiquitous concern that many people in many different cultures over many different years have worried about.”