Yearning for sleep while enduring distress: developing a concept useful in nursing care by April L. Shapiro

The aim of this article is to explain the development of the phenomenon of yearning for sleep while enduring distress, in order to highlight its therapeutic potential for patients. The concept developed by April L. Shapiro to describe an individual’s yearning for sleep and the associated distress is based on an iterative back-and-forth process comprising ten stages based on Liehr and Smith’s method. In her attempt to characterize this phenomenon, the author offers some initial insights that need to be further developed before it can be considered a full-fledged middle-range theory.