Jasmine Nicole

A lesson everyone can benefit from learning is to take time to rest. I can only speak from my experience and the experiences of those close to me, but last year when the lockdown happened, it gave people time to rest.

Before I continue, I do acknowledge that there were a lot of people who were set back from the lockdown caused by the pandemic. On one side, I think it caused a lot of people to get some much-needed time to rest. I also acknowledge that privilege can come into play when rest is talked about. Some people aren’t fortunate enough to take time to rest because their lives would stop if they stop. This lesson is for them too though.

Rest is so important and I think we have built a society where resting is synonymous with laziness and that’s not true. So many of us live day to day pushing through burnout or close to becoming burnt out and we don’t know it. We have been programmed to think that taking time to rest is not okay. We boast about having multiple jobs and never grinding and hustling while people sleep.

We shame people into thinking that they’re not doing enough when the reality is that some people are doing too much. I speak from personal experience because in college I had 5 jobs and was heavy loading as much into my school schedule as possible. I hadn’t even graduated and was already looking at grad schools. I had less than two weeks from undergrad to grad to take a break. I just graduated from grad school and I’m fighting the urge to go back to school and do something more.

I think the world is shifting this narrative though. I think of Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles who both took breaks last year for their mental and physical health. Their actions set into motion conversations that it’s about time we start to have as a society. I think we are starting to learn this lesson that rest is necessary. You cannot pour from an empty cup.

This is the culture that has been built into us. We think we have to keep going. We haven’t been taught to take mental health days, long vacations, and breaks. When we see people do that, we shame them. We think that if we stop, we lose something. But we don’t, if we stop sometimes we can gain mental stability and clarity, we gain energy, we gain a chance to breathe.

Rest can look different for different people too and that’s important to acknowledge. Rest doesn’t always mean to come to a complete stop because some can’t do that. It can mean taking on a less stressful job, stepping down from, or turning down a higher position. It can mean shifting your focus to something that needs more attention like you and your mental health. Rest can mean skipping a workout a couple of times a week. It’s all relative but no matter where you are and what it means to you, we all need to learn to rest more.