Progress Includes Rest: Creating a Balanced Lifestyle
Intentionality is the framework for everything you do while creating the life you want. If you think of your life as a smartphone or smart TV, the app constantly running in the background of life is balance. However, you determine how much or how little balance you want. Some moguls work nonstop without celebrating wins or enjoying the fruit of their labor. Chasing and building a life for yourself, including family, friends, education, etc. requires grit and grind periodically. However, learning to incorporate rest, especially as your life evolves, is adaptable and sustainable living.
There is still a time and place for everything, and in today’s world, it gets more challenging by the minute to slow down and just be. Between social media and the constant societal pressure to go go go, humanity is over-stimulated. We were not created to function in this manner, at least not efficiently. Grinding without breaks to refuel will leave you lethargic, omitting the enjoyment of success of the progress.
Learning the lesson of rest is an ongoing and essential practice, mainly when a pivot moment appears on your journey. Moguls need time to sit still, binge-watch shows and nap. In hindsight, kindergarten nap time was necessary and should continue to be encouraged throughout schooling. It becomes harder to shift directions when exhaustion and sleep deprivation are your travel escorts.
The new companion to Tricia Hersey’s New York Times bestseller Rest Is Resistance, The Nap MInistry’s Rest Deck: 50 Practices to Resist Grind Culture is helping people make healthy changes to lead a life of serenity. Each card presents an idea connected to rest, condemning guilt or shame for taking time to nap or daydream.
“You don’t need permission from anyone else to rest and listen to your body. Let your body be your teacher. Your body knows the way. Your body holds messages of liberation that it can only offer to you while you are in a rested state. One of the deepest lessons as you deprogram from the false teachings of grind culture will be learning to activate your inherent power as a human being. Your brainwashing regarding rest is intimately tied to your self-worth. You deserve rest.”
Tricia teaches audiences about ownership and liberation over their body and their sacredness.
Don’t get caught in the trap of work work work and keeping up with the Joneses. Add rest to your calendar, use your PTO, and set up your outgoing out-of-office email. As mentioned earlier, the quote's last sentence bears repeating, “You deserve REST.”
Hersey, T. (2023). The Nap Ministry's Rest Deck 50 Practices To Resist Grind Culture (1st ed.). Chronicle Books.
Brittany is a book lover with a continuously expanding To Be Read (TBR) List. She lives in an Atlanta suburb with her husband and two daughters.