How to get some damn rest
Rest in purpose
Self help is not known for a “take it easy” attitude to life and work. In fact, hustling is at the heart of a lot of self help advice. Hell, it’s pretty much baked into the whole business model of the genre.
Working harder, wanting it more, never giving up: these are mainstays of advice on how to be successful. Even writers who want to teach us to “work smarter, not harder” are all about productivity, optimization, and hacking time to get the most out of it.
As much as I love reading about, and acquiring, new habits, habit advice also tends toward the idea that we can and should maximize our efficiency in service of often-dubious goals, like losing weight, making more money, or just cramming more shit into our already over-scheduled days.
In many ways, then, self-help is a hand-maiden to capitalism in its current manifestation: neoliberalism. This political-economic rationale insists that we should all be as self-sufficient as possible, are responsible for our successes or failures, and that “success” is narrowly defined by accumulating wealth and assets.
Self help advice doesn’t usually challenge this framework in a meaningful way, if at all. It encourages us to “help” our “selves” in ways that prepare us to be better workers and consumers within the system. It also perpetuates the idea that improving our lives is an individual project. Given that another key tenet of neoliberalism is that we should want and get as little as possible from the state, self help plays neatly into its hands.
All of this context is one of the reasons I have a very conflicted relationship with self help. On the one hand, I believe that one of the purposes of life is to grow into better versions of ourselves. On the other hand, I want that to have nothing to do with making me a better subject under capitalism!
I also know that I have still have vestiges of grind culture to work out of my system. I like a certain amount of busyness and when I don’t have something to do I can feel antsy and unsettled. I’ve quieted the voice that once said, “You should be working!” But there’s another tiny voice that whispers, “Are you sure there isn’t something you’re supposed to be doing?”
Those of us in academia (or really, any profession where the work-life boundaries are porous as hell) have a hard time with these voices. In my case, I think some of it is my “achiever” personality, which is basically a perfect soldier for the hustle. Looking for validation and lovableness through achievement is a recipe for a life of grind.
Nonetheless, I’ve gotten pretty good at silencing the grind-y messages in my head. When work thoughts intrude, like if I find myself mentally composing an email in bed, I shut it down by thinking, “No one is paying you to work right now!” This works for me because I really despise the idea of giving free labour to an institution like my university.
When I stumbled across The Nap Ministry on social media a few years ago, I was really primed to hear Nap Bishop Tricia Hersey’s message about rest as resistance.
It’s one thing to resist the idea that you should be working all the time. It’s another to go a step further and accept that you are allowed to rest, truly rest. After all, even when we’re not working for money we’re often filling our time with other kinds of busyness that are adjacent to grind culture: consumerist self-care activities; buying things; gifting free content to social media; working out; doing home improvement projects; dragging our kids to extracurriculars; reading self-help books.1
Hersey pointedly calls all of this out via her Twitter and Instagram accounts (from which she takes long breaks) and in her 2022 book, Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto. Writing from a Black radical tradition, Hersey situates rest as necessary—foundational, even—in order to divest from and dismantle white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy.
Hersey came to found The Nap Ministry in response to her own experiences with grind culture in academia. The expectation to work and function like a machine was, Hersey realized, a direct extension of what her enslaved ancestors were forced to do. The line from enslaved labour to grind culture was, unfortunately, an unbroken one. Rest is integral to breaking this chain.2
As Hersey insists, her message is about more than naps (although naps are highly encouraged). It’s about the fundamental right of all beings to lay themselves down and rest. This is the part of her message that people seem to have a hard time taking on board. We’ve internalized grind culture so deeply that we can only see rest as a reward for productivity, in service of productivity, or a necessary evil that takes us away from being productive.
Others ask, how can I rest when I have mouths to feed, bosses to answer to, bills to pay? Hersey insists that if she could rest, if her grandmother could rest, if even enslaved ancestors could rest, than anyone can. She deliberately refuses to give people step-by-step instructions for finding time to rest. After all, this is a manifesto, not a self-help book.
This book is immensely helpful, though. It reframes rest as something divine, not just a basic biological need. It offers a way of thinking about rest that gives it a powerful enough rationale to just possibly combat the intrusive, internalized noise of grind culture.
This message is extremely powerful for anyone from a group whose labour has been (and usually still is) exploited, underpaid, undervalued, and made invisible. For me, for example, a nap is even more palatable when it’s also a fuck you to the patriarchy.
What if rest is reparations? What if naps are monkey-wrenches in the gears of the machine? What if naps are feminist? Does this change the way you think about rest, or justify it for yourself, or encourage it in others?
One piece of Hersey’s work that bears some similarities to self help is the claim that by resting, we allow for more abundance to come into our lives. I feel like this is true, but of course there’s no way to objectively know, or even measure, such a thing. It’s a leap of faith. Again, that’s why it’s a ministry and a manifesto, not a science paper.
Rest around and find out
One thing we do know for sure is that grind culture is really fucking us up. Our minds and bodies are breaking down. The planet is falling apart. We’re enriching billionaires and impoverishing billions. So what do we have to lose by giving rest a chance?
Following The Nap Bishop has given me some tools for bringing a different mindset to rest. When I take a nap or just take a little time in the day to do nothing, I say to myself: “I choose rest.” This has more conscious intention behind it, rather than “I’m exhausted” or “I’ve earned it so it’s okay.”
I don’t feel the need to make up for lost time if I rest or get some movement in during the day. I do enough (I am enough). I don’t have to prove anything to anyone or “perform” a hustle to show my value.
This doesn’t mean that I never feel stress about work, or have the sense that I’m behind, or think I could be more successful at something if I tried harder. I have all those feelings. They might never go away. But I’m grateful that I also have The Nap Ministry to provide a counter-narrative.
How are you resting this week?
What I’m reading: Just started Tara Schuster’s Glow in the F*cking Dark. I feel like this book is going to be A LOT but I’m willing to go along for the ride.
What I’m looking forward to: Next week I’m heading to London to give a talk at the Festival of Place. I’ll also get to connect with family and friends.
It’s me, hi, I’m the problem it’s me.
At this point I took a break and went outside, where I chatted with a friendly squirrel, whose personal hustle is living off all the spilled birdseed in our backyard.