‘We Are Not Waiting. We Are Not Asking Permission.’

In "Rest Is Resistance," Tricia Hersey provides guidance on navigating these times.

Konrad Mägi’s “Saadjärv – Äksi kirik” via Artvee.

When author Tricia Hersey was working more than 40 hours a week at an underpaid job, she used to stare out the window on her morning commute, watching the birds. It was a moment of sanctuary in her long, sleep-deprived days.

You can get a lot done on a bus ride—answer emails, prep for a meeting, make a grocery list. But in this small moment of refusal, Hersey liberated herself. It was her declaration that she was entitled to rest not because she worked hard but because it was her birthright.

Hersey is the author of Rest Is Resistance and We Will Rest! and the founder of The Nap Ministry, which invites people to sleep in public spaces. She is also a Black theologian and artist who spent her childhood watching exhausted family members navigate systems designed to exploit them, from her great-grandmother who lived through Jim Crow to her father who woke up a 4 a.m. each morning just so he could carve out time to sip his coffee and read the paper. She has also studied the lives of her ancestors, whose stolen labor and sleep formed the economic foundation of this country.

Rest Is Resistance was published in 2022, but its wisdom is helping me deal with this moment.

I know I can’t close my eyes to the horrors unfolding right now, but I also know that flooding my body with cortisol while doomscrolling doesn’t help. Keeping people agitated and confused appears to be part of this administration’s strategy.

In the book, Hersey describes a group of formerly enslaved people known as the Maroons. They jumped off ships, fled plantations and settled in the wilderness, where they formed their own societies, hidden from the rest of the country. “They were not runaways,” she writes. “They simply never accepted the role of enslavement and never allowed the plantation to be home.”

Hersey invites us to follow their example: “We are resting regardless of what these systems are doing. We are not waiting. We are not asking permission.”

In difficult times, the term “self-care” is often met with an eye roll. I used to feel this way sometimes, my derision mostly aimed at myself: The world is burning and you’re going to yoga!? Hersey flatly rejects the idea that rest is an indulgence:

Rest is not a privilege because our bodies are still our own, no matter what the current systems teach us. The more we think of rest as a luxury, the more we buy into the systematic lies of grind culture.

There are plenty of books that extol the virtues of rest and sleep. They explain how rest keeps you healthy, makes you a better parent, and ultimately enables you to get more work done. They offer suggestions like putting your phone in another room at bedtime, buying high thread-count sheets and meditating.

Rest Is Resistance is different. The point is not to recharge so you’ll be in fighting shape come Monday morning. The point is to claim rest and leisure as your due—and resist the lure of a grind culture that encourages us to measure our worth by how much we accomplish: “We are not resting to be productive. We are resting simply because it is our divine right to do so. That is it!”

Hersey also warns readers not to be seduced by consumerism’s attempts to address burnout—wellness retreats, pricey mattresses, bathrooms renovated to look like hotel spas. These luxuries are nice, but they also frame rest as something one earns, a reward purchased via labor.

Hersey’s solution is much simpler, and more radical: Take a nap, watch the birds, have a soak in your unstylish 1970s-era tub. She writes:

When we rest, we are pushing back against a system created on plantations, with a central belief that we must have money, a fancy mattress, and the allure of individualism for our rest to be generative. This is a lie. We must slowly unravel daily to understand that our liberation, our freedom, and everything we need is already within us. It doesn’t matter how much money we make and how many vacations we take. What matters is that in our hearts and souls we have decided to refuse and not wait until we have enough or have the perfect number of external things for our rest.

As I’ve written before, sleep is bad for the economy. In Stolen Focus, Harvard Medical School Sleep Researcher Charles Cziesler explains to author Johann Hari that “sleep is a big problem” for our economic system: “If you’re asleep you’re not spending money, so you’re not consuming anything. You’re not producing any products.” Cziesler adds that if people went back to getting a healthy amount of sleep “it would be an earthquake for our economic system, because our economic system has become dependent on sleep-depriving people.”

I’ve also written about the way many employers use “self-care” as the panacea for workplace stress. Rather than address the central problem—a toxic office culture or unrealistic workloads—managers counsel employees to meditate or start running, thus adding additional tasks to their to-do lists. In The Gospel of Wellness, journalist Rina Raphael shares the story of nurses working around the clock during the COVID-19 pandemic. After they requested relief—in the form of extra staff or compensation to help manage their home lives (cleaning services, take-out, etc.)—management sent them to a Zoom presentation that advised them to drink more water and take up yoga.

Hersey makes space for this complexity. She understands that we must live in this world—we must work to pay bills, navigate our byzantine healthcare system, and handle our family lives in a society that offers little support for people caring for children or aging parents. She admits that there are times when she has pulled all-nighters to get a particular piece of work done, and she extends this grace to the rest of us. We don’t have to be perfect:

How do we transform grief into power? Lay and rest in the question. We don’t have to have a complete answer to everything right now. We don’t have to be everything. We don’t have to do everything.

I want to be a good citizen and help people more vulnerable than I am. But I also don’t want to let the criminals in power destroy my psyche. So I’m putting guardrails around my sanity. I’ve pared my media diet down to newspapers, magazines, books, newsletters and newscasts centered around reporting rather than commentary; I've stopped watching CNN, MSNBC and late-night comedy. I've stayed on the mailing list of a small group of activists and politicians I respect—people who have been doing the nitty-gritty work of sustaining democracy and our ecosystem for many decades—but I’ve deleted nearly all social media apps from my phone.

I won’t apologize for getting a full night’s sleep, taking a hike with my husband and dog, or hanging out with friends and not discussing politics. I also won’t judge others. If people are freaking out on social media, they have good reason. If people are hiding under the covers, they have good reason.

We’re at the beginning of a long, scary and uncertain journey, and we all have to figure out how we are going to meet this moment. The call to claim rest as your birthright doesn’t have to mean shutting out the world, or turning away from vulnerable people who need you.

Instead, it means grounding yourself in the knowledge that you deserve to rest, even if you sometimes feel like you can’t. It means exerting energy toward the things you care about, but not getting caught in the grind-culture trap of judging yourself by how much you get done.

There is a widescale theft going on, and it’s incredibly alarming. That’s why I think it’s important to cultivate the kind of self-possession that can never be taken away. For that, Hersey is an excellent guild.

How are you navigating this moment?