Rest is Resistance

 

 

“Rest is not a privilege. Rest is a birthright.”

— Tricia Hersey, The Nap Ministry

Tricia Hersey teaches that rest is a portal: a spiritual and embodied practice carried through generations. Rest honours the wisdom of those before us and prepares the ground for the world we are shaping now. It is a way of returning to ourselves with clarity, steadiness, and dignity.

The Politics of Exhaustion

Modern activism often unfolds in a rhythm of constant urgency. Calendars fill, bodies push past limits, and depletion becomes normalised. These patterns are shaped by systems that depend on overstretched people — systems that draw from our time, attention, and emotional energy.

The same forces that exploit labour and extract resources also extract energy — from our bodies, our emotions, our attention. Exhaustion reduces our capacity to imagine and to act with intention. Meanwhile, rest opens space for clarity and steadiness. 

Capitalism and patriarchy thrive when people are too tired to imagine alternatives. Around the world, movements confronting authoritarianism, colonial extraction, and racial violence have long treated rest as part of their strategy for survival and continuity.

 To rest is non-compliance. It is saying: my body is not a machine for your momentum.

A Feminist History of Fatigue

Women and marginalised people have long carried the invisible weight of care: whether that’s physical, emotional, or organisational. The unpaid labour that sustains movements has often been performed by those least recognised for it.

Feminist scholars like bell hooks and Audre Lorde warned that activism without care replicates the same hierarchies it seeks to dismantle.

Lorde, living with cancer while fighting racism and homophobia, wrote:

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

Her words reflect the lived reality of many who organised while managing illness, caregiving, discrimination, and daily survival. It echoes through global organising traditions from Afro-Brazilian organisers, Palestinian women resisting occupation to Indigenous land defenders across the Americas. Care has always been a form of strategy.  

Why the System Wants You Tired

Systems built on extraction often create conditions of fatigue: through bureaucracy, instability, digital overwhelm, and emotional strain. 

Exhaustion is profitable. Tiredness makes it harder to think expansively or act in alignment with long-term purpose. Tired people buy convenience. They scroll instead of organise. They outsource thought to algorithms that feed them outrage in bite-sized doses…

Behavioural science calls it ego depletion: when mental and emotional fatigue reduce our ability to make good decisions. The more tired we are, the easier we are to manipulate — as citizens, consumers, and campaigners.

That’s why authoritarian politics relies on fatigue: it wears people down until cynicism feels safer than hope.

Communities living under surveillance, censorship or state violence often describe exhaustion as something deliberately manufactured, through bureaucratic obstacles, digital harassment and the constant demand to justify their humanity. In such contexts, rest becomes clarity. 

The Neuroscience of Stillness

Rest is the state of processing. When we pause, the brain’s “default mode network” activates , supporting reflection, empathy, memory integration, and creative problem-solving.

Laurence Cox’s work on “personal sustainability in social movements”  identifies lack of self-care (including rest, boundaries, social support) as a key predictor of burnout and eventual disengagement. People engaged in long-term activism who integrate deliberate rest — sleep, art, nature, ritual — sustain engagement longer than those who don’t.

Many Eastern cultures have long understood this – Sufi contemplative traditions, Buddhist mediation, Yoruba healing practices… They all frame a stillness as a way to know the world more deeply and connect with it on a more cellular level. 

Reclaiming Rhythm

Movements thrive when they follow natural rhythms — moments of gathering and moments of grounding. Cultures across the world have created structures to protect this balance: the judeo-Christian Sabbath, the Spanish siesta, countless festivals and harvest cycles worldwide, and West African drum circles that attune communities to collective rhythm.

These traditions remind us that restoration is essential for coherence and direction.

Pace shapes culture. Cultural expressions of rest — music, storytelling, dance, shared meals, communal silence — have supported movements throughout the Far East, across the African continent, and throughout Latin America. These practices offer refuge and reinforce our shared humanity.

To resist is to reclaim rhythm — for ourselves and for our work. Schedule silence as fiercely as meetings. Build rest into the structure of your organisation, not as crisis recovery but as culture. Ask in your team check-ins: What are we celebrating? What can we pause? Who needs rest right now?

This is what sustainable leadership looks like.

Practising Rest as Resistance

When movements centre rest, they make space for imagination, intergenerational wisdom, and a slower, deeper connection.

Rest alters the pace at which we relate to the world.  

Here are small, radical ways to begin:

Pause the feed. Unplug without apology. The world will keep turning. Reclaim sleep. It’s a necessity, not a luxury. Move your body for pleasure, not proof. See it as a gift to yourself, not a punishment. Celebrate micro-wins. Rest isn’t only recovery; it’s reward. Share the load. Redistribute emotional and administrative labour across teams. Make joy visible. Laughter in the face of despair is defiant.

Each act of rest chips reinforces our inherent worth, not needing to earn it through overextension. It debunks the myth that we are only as valuable as what we produce. 

The Invitation

Rest is the pause where ideas grow and courage replenishes. It keeps compassion intact and prepares us to keep showing up with integrity. It’s what keeps compassion from curdling into cynicism. It’s what lets us show up, again and again, with  our hearts still intact.

To rest is to remember that you are more than your output. You are the instrument through which change is made. And instruments need tending.

So close the laptop. Take the walk. Light the candle.

Rest is part of the work.

🧭 Try This Next

Essay: Your Voice, Your Pace — for building voice with balance.Resource: The Art of Leading Change — why rest is also a leadership strategy.