By Arca Jalee Wellness 18.06.2026

Tired, Stressed, or Burned Out? These Ancient Cures Could Be The Answer To Modern Problems

The old-world practices inspiring today's wellness trends.

How many tabs have you got open right now? Are your shoulders scrunched up near your ears? Jaw tight? When was the last time you completed a full blink? Wired and tired seems to be the resting state for many of us, and we're quick to point at the rigmarole of modern life as its cause, but we're also reaching for remedies that are so old their instructions might've been etched into a cave wall.

The idea that Neanderthals turned to day spas to cope with burnout might seem incredible. Whether they ever sat in a warm spring and sighed, we'll never know, but stress is as old as people are, and across millennia it has produced a lineage of wellbeing practices we're rediscovering (or reinventing) today.

Here are five you'll recognise, their ancient origins, and why they're worth your time.

1. Gua sha

You may know this as a smooth jade or rose-quartz tool, stroked over the face to de-puff and ease tension, a relaxing process that can be the last step of a skincare routine or independent of it, a use-as-needed practice. Its origins are a little more hardcore.

Gua sha began as serious medicine in China, with origins in the ancient use of smoothed stones and a formal place in traditional Chinese medicine by the Ming dynasty. The name describes the method: gua means to scrape; sha, the reddish marks it raises. A practitioner oiled the skin and drew a coin or a buffalo-horn tool down the back and shoulders until marks came up, treating fevers, colds and pain. The bruising was the sign that whatever was stuck had been drawn out.

Today's familiar Gua sha is far gentler. People swear by it for easing facial and neck tension, and for making a puffy, tired face look brighter and more awake.

2. Viking Spa

Today, you might lounge in a sauna, then take a gasping plunge into icy water, over and over, usually at an urban bathhouse with tea rooms, a membership fee and mandatory bathers.

However, for centuries across Scandinavia and Iceland, going between heat and cold was simply how people survived the winters, and it marked the calendar, since the Old Norse word for Saturday, laugardagr, meant 'washing day.' The Norse groomed themselves well enough to annoy the neighbours: a 13th-century English chronicler grumbled, in a much-repeated and not-entirely-trustworthy aside, that Danish settlers bathed every Saturday and combed their hair daily, and used it to seduce Englishwomen and the daughters of nobles.

The hot-to-cold ritual endures because of its felt benefits: a hot-then-cold cycle leaves most people calmer and oddly clear-headed afterwards, almost rebooted.

3. Hammam

You'll find it on spa menus worldwide as a 'purifying ritual': steam, a brisk scrub on hot marble, a slow cool-down, done alone and priced as a luxury, but its beginnings were entirely communal. The hammam descends from the Roman bathhouse, adapted across the Middle East and North Africa from the 7th and 8th centuries, where bathing was tied to faith and physical cleanliness was bound up with spiritual purity. And for women, it was a rare public world of their own. In 1717, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu found the women's bath in Sofia full of women lounging and gossiping for hours; the women's coffee-house, she called it, where all the town's news was told.

The solo spa version loses the crowd, and thus the social aspect, but the other good stuff remains: deep heat that limbers the muscles, and an hour where your only task is to do nothing.

4. Yoga nidra

You may know it as NSDR (non-sleep deep rest), the lie-down a Stanford neuroscientist popularised, but the practice is much older, and it is called yoga nidra. 'Yogic sleep' appears in old Indian texts like the Mahābhārata to describe a deity's cosmic sleep, though the practice people actually do (lying still while a teacher guides your attention slowly around the body, easing you toward deep relaxation) was assembled in the 1960s by Swami Satyananda Saraswati from a ritual called nyasa (some scholars think he borrowed as much from Western relaxation methods as from ancient sources).

It's been rebranded a few times, but the appeal is timeless: deep rest without the pressure to fall asleep, the kind leaving you feeling like you've slept for hours. Something to master before your next long-haul flight.

5. Cupping

Do you remember the first time you saw those tidy purple circles on an athlete and assumed, reasonably, a giant squid was involved? That's cupping, where cups are applied to the body to create suction that draws blood to the surface, and it's one of the oldest treatments on record. It can be traced to ancient Egyptian medicine, and it turned up independently in Chinese and Greek practice, Hippocrates included. It was ordinary medicine, used for chest complaints and pain and kept in European hospitals into the 19th century, until pharmaceuticals crowded it out.

It returned to Western view in 2016, when Michael Phelps arrived at the Rio Olympics covered in uniform, circular bruises and sent the internet looking for answers. Athletes and spa-goers swear by cupping for sore muscles and tension, and the relief people report is why it has outlived nearly every attempt to retire it. Of the five here, it's the one to leave to a trained practitioner.

These practices endure because they make people feel good. Names change, prices change, the rituals change (a jade roller here, a membership fee and a plunge pool there) but the reason people keep coming back has barely changed in thousands of years. We're only the latest to write it down, passing the same ancient knowledge from one tablet to another.