Rest as Resistance
Saying No to Grind Culture with Your Whole Body
Rest is not laziness, a luxury, or a prize you earn for being productive enough. Rest is a practice of refusal in a world that treats human beings—especially Black, brown, disabled, queer, trans, fat, and poor folks—as resources to be extracted until they break. Rest as resistance says: this body will not be sacrificed to grind culture, white supremacy, or capitalism, no matter how many hustle-flavored affirmations they slap on a mug.
Honoring the Black Feminist Lineage of Rest
Before “self-care” became a marketing category, Black feminists were writing about care and rest as survival and strategy in the face of racism, misogyny, and state violence. Contemporary conversations about “rest as resistance” sit in a lineage that includes Black liberation theology, womanism, and abolitionist thought, not just wellness trends.
Any honest conversation about this topic needs to name and honor Black women and femmes—especially Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry and author of Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto—as central architects of this movement. Hersey’s work roots rest in Black liberation, connecting the exploitation of enslaved Africans’ labor to today’s grind culture and insisting that rest is a birthright and a spiritual, political act.
What “Rest as Resistance” Actually Means
In this framing, rest is not just “taking a break so you can get back to work refreshed.” Rest is a refusal to let your worth be measured only in output, productivity, or how well you perform being “fine.” It disrupts the lie that constant urgency is normal and that exhaustion is a personal failure instead of a systemic design.
Rest as resistance can look like:
Closing the laptop when the workday ends, even if capitalism whispers, “Just one more email.”
Choosing a nap, a stare-out-the-window moment, or quiet time over yet another unpaid emotional labor task.
Saying no to roles, relationships, or expectations that depend on you ignoring your limits.
These choices may seem small, but they are not neutral. Every time you choose rest over extraction, you step out of the script that says your body exists to serve systems, not to be fully alive.
Rest, Ancestors, and Collective Care
Rest as resistance is also deeply ancestral. Hersey and other Black thinkers connect deliberate rest to histories of enslaved people slowing work, sabotaging tools, and creating small pockets of reprieve as acts of quiet rebellion. To lie down now, to turn away from overwork, is a way of honoring those who were denied rest and of refusing to repeat that violence on your own body.
And while rest is personal, it is not only individual. Rest as resistance invites community care: sharing resources so people can actually take time off, creating spaces where rest is normalized, not shamed, and understanding that some of us are more surveilled, punished, or economically vulnerable when we stop moving. Rest becomes part of a collective strategy for imagining and building more just futures—futures that require imagination we simply don’t have access to when we’re burned out.
How Soma Roots Therapy Thinks About Rest
At Soma Roots Therapy, rest is treated as a justice issue and a somatic need, not a cute suggestion tacked onto the end of a session. Therapy might explore how grind culture, racism, fatphobia, ableism, transphobia, and class realities have trained you to ignore your body’s signals until crisis hits. Together, sessions can support you in experimenting with small, accessible acts of rest that fit your actual life and identities, rather than replicating perfectionist wellness routines.
This could include: noticing early signs of nervous-system overload; practicing micro-pauses between tasks; making grief, anger, and numbness legitimate reasons to slow down; and unlearning shame around needing “more” rest than the people around you. Rest is framed not as “checking out,” but as resourcing your body so you can choose how you want to show up—for yourself, your people, and the worlds you’re trying to build.
Rest here is not a performance test. You do not fail the assignment if you still overwork sometimes; that’s part of living in these systems. The point is to grow your capacity to recognize when your body says “enough” and to treat that message as sacred, not inconvenient.
