Your Voice, Your Pace

We live in a time where silence feels complicit, but speaking up can feel exhausting and/or anxiety-inducing. Between misinformation online, workplace politics, performative allyship, and the constant churn of outrage, many people retreat not from apathy but exhaustion. And this exhaustion isn’t distributed evenly — marginalised people carry disproportionate emotional labour: explaining, educating, translating harm, and absorbing backlash. It’s no surprise burnout hits them hardest.

Choose Voice Over Volume

You don’t need to be loud to be effective. Influence comes from clarity, intention, and knowing when — and where — your voice can shift something.

Online culture rewards quick takes and constant posting, but social change happens through thoughtfulness, not speed.

Before saying something, pause and ask:

• What am I adding to this conversation?
• Am I sharing to be seen, or to be useful?
• Is your voice the right voice for this moment?

Speaking less but speaking with purpose often lands more deeply than reacting at speed.

Practice Sustainable Activism

Burnout happens when empathy outpaces our boundaries and when systems rely on the emotional labor of marginalised people to stay informed. You don’t have to show up for every cause, every day, on every platform. Focus on the issues where you have personal connection, credibility, or expertise. Rotate your energy to keep your activism going long-term.

Instead, focus where you have:

• Connection (it matters to you)
• Credibility (you have knowledge or lived experience)
• Capacity (you have the energy right now)

Think in cycles rather than permanence:

Engage → Rest → Reflect → Re-engage.

This rhythm sustains your impact — and your wellbeing — over time.

Redefine What Speaking Up Means

We often equate “speaking up” with public activism — posting, debating, leading. But powerful advocacy happens quietly too: 

• Calling someone in, instead of calling them out.
• Working with your team to assess how decisions are made
• Challenging a biased policy at work.
• Mentoring a colleague to use their own voice.
• Choosing to speak in rooms your identity gives you access to, especially when others cannot safely do so.

Small acts of integrity ripple further than performative declarations ever will. Meaningful presence is what moves people.

Guard Your Energy Online

Digital activism has democratised who gets to speak and who gets targeted. Trolls, pile-ons and exposure to harm can take a real psychological toll especially on women, people of colour, LGBTQIA+ people and activists who speak on oppression.

So here are some tips to scroll more mindfully:

• Curate your feed: follow credible voices that inspire or motivate you and reflect a diversity of lived experience. 
• Stay informed without drowning in harm. Seek out reporting and storytelling that adds depth
• Unfollow or block the accounts that drain you.
• Don’t read comments you don’t need to.
• Take breaks when needed, without guilt. Saying less for a while doesn’t make you less committed — it makes you more resilient. 

Anchor in Purpose, Not Performance

The quickest path to burnout is mistaking public performance for actual impact. Ask yourself:

Why does this matter to me? What am I trying to shift?

When your activism aligns with your values instead of your validation, it becomes steadier, clearer, and less reactive. Purpose creates resilience; performance creates fragility.

Build a Circle of Support

No one sustains this work alone.  Behind every outspoken person is a web of people who listen, hold space, and remind them to rest.

Find your circle — the friend you can vent to without judgment, the colleague who has your back, the community that refills your energy. If you can’t find one, join one: mutual-aid networks, feminist collectives, or digital communities like Comotion!

Rest as Resistance

Relaxation is comfort — time with friends, reading something joyful, doing the things that make you feel restored. Important, yes. Political, no.

Rest, in the way Tricia Hersey teaches it, is something different: Rest is a refusal to be consumed. Rest interrupts grind culture. Rest slows the machinery that treats our bodies as resources to extract from.

Rest looks like:

• Closing the laptop at 5pm because your body said “enough,” not because the task list is done
• Scheduling “no-meeting days” to protect your thinking time
• Choosing depth over urgency — reading one article well instead of skimming ten

Rest slows the machinery that treats our bodies as resources to extract from — the culture of performative productivity, constant availability, and the myth that worth is tied to output.

Rest is a boundary, a political stance against systems that rely on our exhaustion to function.

When we embrace rest, we’re not stepping away from the work. We’re refusing to replicate the very logics we’re trying to dismantle.

Your Voice, Your Pace

Speaking up for change is a lifelong practice.  You don’t need to speak up on everything. The goal is to stay present and informed on the issues that matter to you.

Sustainable change requires sustainable people. Build the rhythms that keep you whole.

🧭 Try This Next

Read our essay: Rest is Resistance — on why care is the foundation of sustainable change.