Let’s Rest & Resist Grind Culture
The new book Rest Is Resistance really spoke to me. Author Tricia Hersey, a Black Liberation activist and Founder of the Nap Ministry, takes on the social norms exaggerating the value of work and contributing to social media addiction She attributes our high levels of burnout, anxiety, depression and poor health to the destructive habits of “Grind Culture.”
Hersey notes that sleep deprivation affects all Americans, regardless of gender, age, location, socioeconomic status and background. But she cites research showing BIPOC individuals have the most serious consequences. She believes this is true because most people of color learned as children they would need to work twice as hard as their white counterparts to achieve the same level of success. She calls sleep deprivation “a racial and social justice issue.”
Reading Hersey’s book, I saw the many ways my own life as a white person had been shaped by Grind Culture. Her words sent me reeling back to my job as an editor at a nonprofit. My team and I thought nothing about working past midnight at least twice a month to get the paper out on time. Fast forward decades later to my job as a development director for group that had just laid off three fundraising staff: I was expected to do the same amount of work the prior DD did, but with a fraction of the support. I found myself regularly losing sleep over unmet tasks. A bit wiser then, I started looking for another job the day my boss told me, “You’ll get used to missing sleep.” I left a couple of months later.
I came to understand that I had brought to both my jobs internalized messages that fed workaholic tendencies, such as those telling me to work through pain to get work done. Those messages had been instilled long ago by parents who liked to tell me to “Make hay while the sun shines” and “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”
In Rest Is Resistance, Hersey describes her own reckoning with burnout. She realized her well-being was at stake and made a radical shift; she told her family, friends and colleagues that she was taking several months off from work. With some frustration, she describes how some people were unable to respect her wishes during this period, so caught up were they in the urgency of Grind Culture. From her insights during her sabbatical, the Nap Ministry was born in 2016 to offer exhausted, overworked individuals explicit permission to rest, daydream and fall asleep in safe and comfortable spaces in community.
The Nap Ministry calls itself “an organization that examines the liberating power of naps [whose framework] engages with the power of performance art, site-specific installations, and community organizing to install sacred and safe spaces for the community to rest together. We facilitate immersive workshops and curate performance art that examines rest as a radical tool for community healing. We believe rest is a form of resistance.”
Other than participate in collective napping with the Nap Ministry, what steps might we take right now to change our inner monologues and drown out the external voices that tell us to prioritize everything except our need to relax, play and rest? How might we tap into our body’s and our spirit’s wisdom to resist Grind Culture?