Rest is Resistance

I deserve to rest now.
I am worthy of rest.
I am not lazy.
Capitalism wants my body to be a machine. I am not a machine.
I am a magical and divine human being.
I have the right to resist grind culture.
I don’t have to earn rest.
Do less, watch how I thrive.
Ease is my birthright.
I will rest!
— Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto (2022)

What if we stopped resting in order to be more productive, and started resting simply because we are human? That question sits at the heart of Tricia Hersey’s teaching. She challenges a lifetime of conditioning, the belief that our worth must be proven, justified, earned. That ease is a reward, not a right. That exhaustion is virtue. Hersey names this belief system plainly. She calls it grind culture. She calls it violence.

Hersey, a theologian who calls herself the Nap Bishop, traces grind culture to its roots in chattel slavery, where Black bodies were worked without pause, without agency, without rest. That logic didn’t disappear. It evolved. Today many of us carry it inside, believing our worth comes from what we produce. We feel guilt when we slow down, shame when we stop. We override fatigue and call it ambition. A tired people are easier to control.

Her grandmother survived a lynching attempt in Mississippi, lived in poverty, and still chose every single day to close her eyes and pause. From her, Hersey learned that rest is possible even inside systems designed to deny it. The body becomes the site of resistance. Not a machine to be optimized, but something sacred to be tended. Slowing down is both a spiritual practice and a political act.

Sleep scientist Matthew Walker offers a way to understand what exhaustion actually steals from us. He describes the tired brain as looking through a telescope from the wrong end—narrow, myopic, only able to see one step ahead. But when we dream, he says, we flip the telescope around and suddenly apprehend “the full constellation” of possibility. The periodic table came to Mendeleev in a dream. Paul McCartney woke up with “Yesterday” playing in his head. Humans spend more time in REM sleep than any other primate. Walker believes this is part of what made us human: the capacity to imagine what doesn’t yet exist. A tired people cannot dream of freedom. They’re too busy surviving to envision anything else.

Those of us in recovery know what it means to abandon the body, to override hunger, fatigue, fear, and need. We know what it means to treat ourselves as instruments rather than beings. Addiction thrives in that disconnection. For some of us, recovery has meant learning to live in the body again. Back to being present, back to listening for the signals we spent years ignoring. Recovery began when we stopped long enough to imagine another way.

We can begin small. Daydreaming counts. Closing our eyes for thirty seconds counts. Lying down without a screen counts. Saying no to one demand that drains us counts. Hersey invites us to deprogram from the lie that how much we produce determines how much we matter. Rest gives us back our imagination. And imagination is where freedom begins.