Rest as Rebellion

On Sleep, Survival, and the Politics of Being a Body

We live in a world that asks us to trade our bodies for our productivity.
A world that treats exhaustion as virtue and rest as weakness.
A world where care is expected but rarely replenished ~ especially for those of us living at the intersections of queerness, femininity, trauma, and emotional labor.

So when I say rest is political, I mean it literally. When I say sleep is a form of care, I mean it’s a refusal to collapse under systems built on extraction. As a therapist, I watch people try to love, create, parent, organize, and survive from a place of depletion. And I know - through science, through theory, through lived experience - that the body cannot carry the weight of a world in crisis without ritual, without pause, without repair.

Rest is not luxury.
Rest is infrastructure.
Rest is resistance.
Rest is a return.

The Body as a Site of Politics

When we talk about sleep, we’re not just talking about REM cycles or melatonin.
We are talking about a body inside a system.

Research is clear: chronic sleep deprivation destabilizes emotional regulation, narrows the window of tolerance, increases reactivity, impairs memory consolidation, and heightens pain sensitivity (NIH, 2021; Walker, 2017; van der Kolk, 2014). Psychodynamically, a chronically exhausted body has less capacity to metabolize emotions, repair relational ruptures, or maintain boundaries. Politically, an exhausted population is easier to manipulate, easier to silence, easier to distract.

Oppressive systems rely on our fatigue.

Capitalism needs your burnout.
Patriarchy depends on your self-neglect.
White supremacy thrives on your disconnection.
Queerphobia feeds on your depletion.
Trauma keeps the nervous system in a loop of survival, never reaching repair.

Sleep becomes subversive.
Rest becomes reclamation.

Cycle, Not Linearity: A Queer Approach to Rest

Western culture treats rest as a pit stop—an inconvenient interruption in the line from work → output → productivity → collapse.

But bodies are cyclical.
Queer time is cyclical.
Healing is cyclical.

Your body moves like a season, not a machine.

There is the descent (evening), the surrender (sleep), the repair (deep rest), and the return (morning).
There are nights when rest comes easily and nights when trauma pulls you awake.
There are seasons of depletion and seasons of restoration.

A politicized, queer, feminist approach to rest honors these rhythms and says:
“I refuse to force my body into the linearity demanded of me.”

This is what Audre Lorde meant by self-preservation.
This is what Tricia Hersey names as refusal.

Why Rest Feels So Hard (It’s Not You)

You are not bad at resting.
You are living inside conditions that make rest difficult:

1. Capitalist Exhaustion

You were conditioned to earn rest through productivity, never to receive it inherently.

2. Trauma Physiology

Your nervous system learned to stay awake long after danger ended.

3. Feminized Care Labor

You are praised for giving and punished for needing.

4. Queer Survival Strategies

You learned to stay alert—emotionally and literally—to stay safe.

5. Disconnection from the Body

High-demand environments and chronic stress pull you out of interoceptive awareness.

This isn’t pathology.
This is adaptation.

Healing begins with creating the conditions your body reads as safety.

Rest as Relational Practice

Sleep is often framed as an individual act, but it is deeply relational.

Rest strengthens:

• emotional flexibility

• attunement

• empathy

• intimacy

• patience

• co-regulation

Sleeplessness narrows the emotional range. Exhaustion collapses the window of tolerance. Connection becomes harder. Repair becomes heavier. One of the most radical things we can offer our partners, clients, communities, and movements is a nervous system that isn’t constantly fighting for survival.

Rest makes us more available to love.
Rest makes us more available to justice.
Rest makes us more available to each other.

ight Rituals for a Body Politic

Ritual is not self-care gimmickry—it’s interruption.
Ritual is refusal of urgency.
Ritual is nervous-system reparations.

Below are nighttime practices rooted in somatics, psych theory, and anti-capitalist ethics. They are not hacks; they are invitations.

1. The Descending Ritual (reclaiming transition)

Dim the lights.
Touch your body.
Whisper:
“I am not a machine.”

This shifts the nervous system from activation into safety.

2. The Vagal Exhale (interrupting survival mode)

Inhale 4
Exhale 8

Long exhales cue the parasympathetic system to soften—body-level resistance to the adrenaline economy.

3. The Closure Ritual (containment for the psyche)

Write down what still swirls.
Close the notebook.

Tell yourself,
“I will return when I am resourced.”

This echoes psychodynamic containment.

4. Weight & Warmth (for hypervigilant bodies)

Warmth on the chest.
Weight on the lap.
Soft pressure to tell the body: You are held.

5. Practicing Unfinishedness (anti-capitalist edgework)

Leave one task incomplete.

Say: “Rest is not something I earn through perfection.”

This is political de-conditioning.

6. The Earth-Held Surrender (trauma-informed softening)

Imagine the ground rising to cradle you.
Let gravity hold the weight of the day.

Sleep is not performance.
It is receiving.

Returning to the Body

Rest is not the pause between the “real” parts of your life.
It is the real part—the terrain where repair, integration, and reclamation occur.

When we rest:

We remember ourselves.
We reclaim what the world extracts.
We reenter our relationships with softer edges.
We rebuild our capacity for intimacy, justice, and joy.
We place the body—not the system—back at the center.

Rest is not passive.
Rest is practice.
Rest is rebellion.

A Call to Action: Honor Your Body, Refuse the Pace

Tonight, choose one small act of refusal:

• Go to bed earlier than you think you deserve.

• Leave something unfinished without shame.

• Slow your breath instead of pushing through.

• Touch your body with tenderness.

• Let yourself be held by gravity instead of grit.

Let this be your practice: to honor the body that carries you through a world that was never built for your softness.

Every time you rest, you are refusing extraction. Every night you surrender to sleep, you are choosing yourself. Every morning you rise nourished, you are fortifying your capacity to love, to resist, to heal, and to belong.

Your rest is political.
Your sleep is sacred.
Your body is yours.

Let it rest.