Rest is Resistance-Why Slowing Down Is a Radical Act of Healing
Reclaiming rest interrupts grind culture, repairs the nervous system, and pushes back against the structures that depend on our fatigue.
“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
If you feel like your mind cannot catch up to the moment, you are not failing. You are reacting to conditions that were never meant to be survivable. The tension, the restlessness, the sense that you are always behind. These are signs that your nervous system is trying to protect you inside a culture designed to keep you tired.
We live in an economy of overwhelm. As Naomi Klein argues in The Shock Doctrine, crisis is often manufactured because a disoriented public is easier to control. The result is a population running on fumes while power concentrates at the top.
In 2025, nonstop pressure has become normal. Ecological collapse, political violence, inflation, algorithmic distraction, and mass trauma fill the background of our lives. This is not only political strain. It is biological strain. The battleground is the body itself.
Rest becomes resistance because it interrupts this cycle.
Rest as resistance begins with a simple truth. A system that keeps people exhausted keeps them manageable. When you choose rest on purpose, you interrupt that design.
“You refuse the lie that your value depends on output.”
You reclaim your body from a culture that feeds on depletion. Rest becomes a countercurrent. It restores clarity, memory, imagination, and connection. It gives you back the parts of yourself that grind culture tries to strip away.
How Chronic Stress Damages the Nervous System
Chronic stress is not a mindset. It is physiology. Humans evolved for short bursts of danger, not constant uncertainty.
As Stress, Adaptation, and Disease notes, when safety disappears, the amygdala stays activated and cortisol becomes routine.
Under this strain, the brain’s executive functions weaken. Planning, empathy, focus, and creativity fade. Amy Arnsten described these shifts in Stress Signalling Pathways that Impair Prefrontal Cortex Function.
We feel this as burnout, emotional fatigue, attention fragmentation, and self-blame. But burnout is not personal failure. It is a predictable outcome of living in a system that treats the nervous system as a resource to extract.
As Gabor Maté reminds us in In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, trauma is not only what happens to us. It is what happens inside us when our environment becomes unlivable.
Rest becomes resistance because it disrupts the biology of exhaustion.
How Systems of Power Condition Us to Reject Rest
“You learn to wear the mask until the mask wears you.”
— Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
Over time, oppressive systems do not only shape society. They shape our bodies. Urgency begins to feel normal. Exhaustion feels responsible. Productivity becomes proof of worth.
This is internalized empire. It lives in our perceptions, not just our politics. Ignacio Martín Baró wrote about this in Writings for a Liberation Psychology.
The reward system then adapts. The brain learns to crave achievement and external validation because the culture ties worth to output as outlined in Dopamine Reward and Addiction.
As The Age of Surveillance Capitalism notes, add algorithmic manipulation and you have a population hooked on urgency.
Rest becomes resistance because it refuses this conditioning.
Rest as Resistance: What Healing Looks Like in Practice
“The opposite of trauma is not calm. It is connection.”
— Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands
Healing is not withdrawal. Healing is collective rewiring. Rest interrupts systems that rely on overstimulation and depletion. Rest supports the biology of imagination and empathy, which makes it a threat to any structure built on control.
Neuroscience-informed healing
Teach polyvagal theory in communities
Expand access to somatic practices
Build shared nervous system literacy so people can identify fight, flight, freeze, and fawn states and how to work through them in real time.
Structural interventions that support rest
Universal Basic Income
Free, trauma-informed healthcare
Decriminalized housing
A shorter workweek that honors rest as a civic right
Digital hygiene reforms that limit algorithmic harm
Cultural shifts that protect nervous system health
Normalize grief, anger, and slow pace
Recognize care labor as essential work
Fund art, ritual, and storytelling to rebuild cultural memory
As Shawn Ginwright notes in The Future of Healing, we need healing-centered engagement, not only trauma management.
Rest becomes resistance because it rebuilds the conditions for connection.
How Collective Rest Strengthens Movements for Justice
“Our bodies remember what the world taught us to forget. That rest is a form of resistance.”
— Tricia Hersey, The Nap Ministry
A regulated nervous system is not passive. It is powerful. When the body is no longer in survival mode, people regain the capacity to think together, imagine together, and act together.
This is why rest is not an escape from politics. Rest is part of political strategy. Exhausted people cannot build new worlds. Rested people can.
To move toward collective liberation, we need systems that make rest accessible for everyone, not just the privileged. We need education that treats bodies as central, not secondary. We need public policies that understand healing as infrastructure.
Rest becomes resistance because it restores the humanity that exploitation tries to erase.
Final Reflection- Rest is Resistance
Your exhaustion is not evidence of personal failure. It is evidence of a culture that profits from depletion. But you can relearn safety. You can rebuild presence. You can recover the part of yourself that remembers life beyond survival.
Rest is not collapse or escape. It is a conscious refusal to be turned into a machine. It is a return to humanity in a world that profits from forgetting it.
Healing is not retreat. Healing is return. Return to your body. Return to community. Return to futures you were never meant to imagine.