Paper Short Abstract:

What can we learn from sleep, and its failure, about contemporary academia? I discuss not only how academic stress, performance pressure and precarity can cause insomnia, but also how the skills and attitudes one needs to succeed in academia are diametrically opposed to those needed for sleep.

Paper Abstract:

Insomnia is a highly prevalent health concern among anthropologists, and academics more generally. It is often related to (or even caused by) performance pressure and precarity, and it negatively affects people’s ability to perform well and to cope with stress. Moreover, the very skills and attitudes that anthropologists learn to succeed in academia (being self-responsible, hard-working, ambitious, and even vigilant towards superiors, competitors, and peers) are fundamentally opposed to those that are needed to achieve sleep (i.e. patiency, trust, surrender). Academic insomniacs thus often find themselves in a vicious, and seemingly inescapable, cycle of stress and sleeplessness which, over time, often results in depression, burnout, and in severe cases even suicide.

Drawing on ongoing research with people suffering from insomnia (many anthropologists among them), who often experience sleeplessness as a situation of existential crisis and powerlessness, my paper analyzes the manifold links between mental health and contemporary academic research. In particular, I seek to complexify the links between agency, ambition, and achievement. Sleep has a paradoxical relation to intention, and it fundamentally challenges the idea of mastery and self-control: the more one actively tries to sleep, the less possible it becomes. Once it has “chosen to arrive”, sleep is unstoppable. But often people desperately wait for it – and it doesn’t come. In my paper, I take the latter situation – the insomniac’s quintessential dilemma – as a starting point to think about the problems, and failures, of neoliberal academia.