Rest: A key pillar of mortality
I would like to bear my testimony about the critical importance of rest.
Of a good nap, of sleeping in, of taking a mental health day from work or church or other responsibilities because your body is tired, and it needs a break. This is not a sign of weakness or a way your body is letting you down. Rather, it is an opportunity for self-care, for prioritizing your own needs—it is you following Jesus to the mountains to be away from crowds and simply laying your head down, closing your eyes and listening to your body. I know these things to be true.
We all know this. But sometimes we don’t know it. I learned it for real this summer—the summer that I planned to spend hiking and traveling and playing soccer and going to the lake in a two-piece swimsuit with a boy. Instead, I spent it with chronic tonsillitis. Since the last week of May, I’ve been on four increasingly strong antibiotics, I’ve taken more sick time than ever before, I’ve popped dozens of pills and, though I got better, I never fully healed. By Sunday night most weeks, I was doing OK—well enough to go to the gym on Monday morning, able to be a little social, ready for work the next day.
By Tuesday every week I was sick again. I’ve hardly worked a full week all summer because I had to take the last few hours of the week off. I was rundown, I was achy, I was lethargic. After the final go-round of antibiotics, I returned to the ENT to talk about a tonsillectomy. Despite having zero problems with my tonsils for four decades, in seven weeks they’d destroyed themselves and my summer. They were coming out. I just had to make it about 10 days from my final antibiotic to the surgery. The healthier I was when I went into surgery, the easier (relatively) my recovery would be.
In my mind, healthy came from my routine—getting up early, going to the gym, running, biking, making sure I had a balanced diet. So I did that for a time, including going to my soccer game the weekend before surgery. And I had a great time. But I felt the pattern repeating—after a good weekend, I immediately started feeling sick again.
It was three days before surgery that everything clicked. The reason I felt better over the weekend and started feeling sick again every Monday afternoon was because over the weekend, I slept. I went to bed early, I didn’t set my alarm and I got a lot of sleep. On Monday, eager to get back to normal because I felt good, I set my alarm, I got up early to work out, I pushed myself.
Well, this Tuesday I woke up, got dressed, put on an ankle brace (because I’d recently rolled my ankle playing soccer but that also didn’t stop me from exercising) and walked into the living room to find my keys and go to the gym. And in that moment, I realized I was tired. I was sick. I didn’t need 45 minutes on the bike. I needed to sleep. And I turned around and went back to bed. And you know what? I had a pretty good day. I repeated the next couple of days. And I felt better.
This is a hard adjustment for me—I know the health benefits of exercise, and I actually like working out, and I worry about getting fatter if I don’t exercise. (Two of those are valid points to take into consideration.) But in this situation, where my body was struggling with its regular routine because of illness, it didn’t need exercise. It just needed rest. It took me so long to see that.
It has, quite frankly, taken so long to understand this concept in so many aspects of my life. In my experience observing Mormons and being Mormon, rest is not something at which we excel. My seminary classes started at 5:55 a.m. I was tired every day in high school; falling asleep in class was not unusual. I think about my mission, when I actually did sleep close to eight hours a night, but because there is no time for rest during the day, I was still constantly exhausted. I remember dozing off once during a lesson. And a mission isn’t just physically tiring; as an introvert, never being alone meant that my social battery was constantly drained and I never had the chance to recharge. Every part of me was bone-tired. That is a feature of missions, I will note, not a bug.
Outside of those examples, there’s just always work to be done, people to be served, callings that you’re supposed to say yes to. I’ve been to dozens of meetings that started at 6 or 7 a.m. on a Sunday. I’ve agreed to meetings or picked people up to run errands when I was sick. And I’m not even a parent! How much more exhausting is life when you’re getting up with babies, shuttling children around to various activities, never putting yourself first because the sacrifice is motherhood is considered sacrosanct. How many hours—days—years of sleep have women sacrificed for their families, for their spouses, for the church? And what has that netted any of us? When we are taught that sacrifice is one of the highest and holiest of God’s teachings, we understand, both implicitly and explicitly, that there is always someone else to put first. That self-care is selfish.
Rest is resistance, according to Tricia Hersey, who started the Nap Ministry. It’s a radical act of self-love, of self-care, of declaring that you are important, that your needs matter. It’s an act of self-trust—it shows your body that you are listening, that you hear what it’s asking for, that you know how important your own needs are. It is an act of sanctification and healing for your body. And I believe it matters just as much to God as reading scriptures, praying, preparing lessons or fulfilling callings.
A nap isn’t always the answer. It’s not what healed me—that was surgery. (At least, I hope it did the trick. I’m still in the constant-pain-and-discomfort part of recovery.) It rarely fixes the problem with which I’m wrestling. But I always feel better after. The problem is smaller, more manageable when I am well-rested. I feel better, I am in less pain, my brain is more focused and my body knows it can trust me to put it first.
Photo by Vladislav Muslakov on Unsplash
