Napping My Way to Success: An Introduction to Rest

A few weeks ago, a couple of friends and I spent a Saturday evening making vision boards. Though I don’t do them often, I really love vision boards. I'm a firm believer in visualizing the life you want or, in other words, you gotta see it to be it. As my vision board began to take shape, I noticed that most of my images were split into two categories. The left side had many of my career aspirations and though they were lofty, I was proud of them. The right side,  however, contained many of my personal aspirations, most of which involved a lifestyle of leisure and relaxation. I found myself feeling guilty for desiring to rest as much as I desired to reach my professional goals. The “work hard, play hard” lifestyle of my dreams is not one that is often sold to women that look like me. Because of this, I often view rest as something indulgent rather than a key component of my well-being. The more I examined my guilt, I found it rooted in a centuries-old belief that women like me exist solely as mules. That my energy was an unlimited resource, here to give to whoever needed a boost in their endeavors. Now, I am learning that I must reclaim my energy through rest to support my own journey.

So how can we learn to prioritize rest the way we do work? We do that by viewing rest, not as a goal, but as a necessary tool for our upkeep. Resting is often seen as something we need to work towards. We think that if we work hard enough, we get to take a break and relax. But in reality, rest informs the work we do. In fact, if we were willing to lean into the rest that our bodies require, we might find that we get more work done and are more productive. This isn’t to say that the purpose of prioritizing rest is solely to fuel our productivity. But, rather, if we centered rest in the same way we centered hard work, we might find that the byproducts align us more closely with our goals. For me, those goals make room for a life of ease and hard work to exist in tandem.

 In this next season, I want to return to viewing rest as maintenance, not an aspiration. Rest does not have to be earned, longed for, or even seen as a treat. We deserve rest, period. No questions asked. And while it’s easy to visualize rest on a vision board, I think that our commitment to rest needs to show up in our daily lives.  Learning to re-center rest in life will take time, patience, and discipline, but this is the type of work our health depends on. It is my hope that by committing to this work, this self- care, our realities can more closely align with our loftiest visualizations.