Rest Is Not the Enemy of Progress

The back of the couch is softer than it has right to be, lulling my heavy eyelids lower and lower. I force them back open in time to see my daughter awkwardly grab her teething toy, wave it in the air. She shrieks and babbles before it inevitably ends up in her mouth, covered in drool.

My muscles complain more than they have right to, this early in the morning, and my mind idly calculates the time until a nap is due. Cor is curled against me, his back as heavy with sleep as the couch is soft.

Another shrieking babble, and that big toothless grin. The one full of innocence and adoration that makes the whole world feel smaller and safer and worth it. My eyes fight to close, and I summon a small, tired smile. “Does that taste good?” My words sound heavy with fatigue, but it’s simply met with a happy shriek.

Before we sat down, I’d been moving: work, breakfast, training Cor. Whatever it was, it had been enough to keep me awake and moving and focused. The moment I stopped and sat down with her, my body demanded what it was owed.

Every so often, I startle awake. A second or two of sleep, stolen without permission. She gives me another toothless grin.

“You deserve a mother who can actually stay awake for you.” Not that she understands the difference between Mama sitting next to her, engaged, and Mama sitting next to her, asleep. That somehow makes it feel worse, when it should feel like a mercy.

The (Mental) Road Well Traveled

There’s a script running in the background of most of our lives, these days, that talks about mind over matter and pushing through and sacrificing anything that’s not work. It can end up glorifying sleep deprivation and too much stress and any other number of unhealthy things.

Now, don’t hear me wrong: some of the people who talk about this have built real things – amazing things! – and have earned the right to share their stories and testimonies and what worked for them. I seek some of them out to learn from. I’m in no way saying they’re not worth listening to.

HOWEVER.

For many of us (especially those with varying ability levels) there’s a real danger to adopting that yardstick. Physical crashes and burnout are very real. Especially in our world. And for many of us, the recovery tax on ignored rest doesn’t just sting. It compounds in ways that many of those people never had to account for, because their bodies adapted and tolerated it in ways yours might not. One afternoon you pushed through can become three days of reduced capacity. One bad week can become a month of playing catch-up with your own body. The math doesn’t work in your favor, even if it seems to, in the short term.

The above-mentioned conversation too often does you the disservice of not acknowledging that. And the tricky thing is that, for many of us, it feeds into a quieter conversation that’s harder to argue with, because it doesn’t come from a podcast or a YouTube video. It comes from somewhere much closer and harder to turn off: a woman’s own mental comparison.

The Women Before

The pioneer woman.
The medieval peasant.
The slave women throughout history.
Great-grandma who raised six kids on the farm without a peep about her own health.

Those who worked both in the home and the “real world.” Those who raised children in the desert sun or on the prairie with no modern temperature control, no chiropractic care (life-saver for life with little ones, trust me!), no painkillers, no help with meals, no childcare, and certainly no down days because she was off her game. That was her life, handed down through generation after generation. And they were fine.

So where do I get off needing rest?

I run this comparison more than I’d like to admit. And sometimes (not always, but sometimes) I remember to question the premise.

Were they actually fine?

Because they didn’t just have today’s results with more obstacles. Mortality rates were high. Life was brutal and short and hard in ways we have genuinely sanitized in our imaginations. That’s not a standard to aspire to. That’s a cautionary tale we’ve romanticized into a measuring stick and then held against ourselves.

The historical comparison is abstract enough to argue with, if I try hard enough. There’s one that’s harder to, though.

My mom kept a similarly sized house, single-handedly. Three kids. Her own health wasn’t perfect. And she did it. Oh, she had hard days, I’m sure, and moments that weren’t pretty, but she did it. She showed up. She kept things running. And here I am. One baby. Help with the house. Help with food. More support than she had in almost every measurable way. And I’m falling asleep on the floor, as I try to “appreciate every moment.”

That one is harder to shake. Not because it’s a fair comparison, but because I saw it. Because I watched her up close. She didn’t just “manage,” she made my childhood one I’d happily repeat. She’s not an abstraction; she was always my role model. And, because of that, here’s what I have to keep coming back to: I saw what she wanted me to. Just like my daughter, I didn’t see her struggle.

Most parents aren’t going to let their children see the price they pay. I didn’t see the 2am. I didn’t see what things looked like after we were in bed, or behind closed doors, or in the early morning hours. I never saw what she had to let go of to keep the plates that I saw spinning.

The full picture is never visible from the outside, especially to young eyes. And building a case against yourself from half a picture is not honest accounting, let alone fair.

An example: My mom recently told us that there was a span of time that she’d manufactured herself 36-hour days to keep it all afloat. The reaction that got from my doctor husband was one of shock. Like, “how are you still functioning this well” shock. …And maybe realization of a couple things. Now, if you’re like me, your mind says something like,

“*sigh* 36-hour days? *gathers strength and will* alright. Well, if that’s what made it work…”

NO! *baps you with a lilypad* Remember the whole “cautionary tale romanticized into a measuring stick?” That’s what that is, again. Just because it “has been done” doesn’t make it the goal. Or a suggestion. The goal – and any suggestions stemming from it – should first come from a basis in how the body works, and, therefore, how you ought to care for it.

Your Body Has a Limit. And it’s Real.

The human body cannot run indefinitely without rest. This is not a character flaw. It is not a spiritual failing. It is not evidence of insufficient grit. It’s engineering.

When your body is already working hard just to manage its baseline: regulating a nervous system that doesn’t always cooperate, managing symptoms, compensating and adapting because you’re alive…? More energy is demanded for those things, which means less is available for everything else.

The output ceiling is real. It is lower than it is for someone whose body isn’t spending energy on those things. And pretending otherwise doesn’t raise the ceiling. It just drains the account faster.

You can spend within your budget, or you can overdraft. But the overdraft fee for a differently-abled body isn’t just tiredness. It can be physical ability, brain fog, concentration and critical thinking, a tendency to be asocial; any number of things. It’s the version of you that has to cancel, has to slow down, has to hand things off; not because she chose to, but because her body made the choice for her when she wouldn’t. Not couldn’t: wouldn’t. And it doesn’t necessarily only last for a day or two. It lasts as long as your body takes to recover.

And that makes “hustle culture,” while maybe alluring, a very unwise idea, long term.

Rest Was Built Into the Plan From the Beginning

For those of you not aware of it, yet, I am a person of faith. More, I am a Christian whose gospel is built on the Old Testament. Including a view of Sabbath.

(If you aren’t of the same persuasion, stay with me.)

The idea of rest is given as a command to the Israelites early on in their nation-hood. Let’s look at that, for a minute.

God was building a nation for Himself pretty much from the ground up: laws, culture, expectations. Heck, He establishes the calendar they live by. And, in the top ten laws, He lays out the order for rest once a week.

To whom? A people who had been slaves: who had spent generations making mud bricks and building storage cities in the desert sun; driven hard, with no say and no stopping. That was all they’d ever known. That had been their inheritance. And here, He changes that precedent.

When God brought them out of Egypt and began building a nation from them, He didn’t bury the command to rest somewhere deep in the legal code of Deuteronomy, or reserve it only for the holy men in Leviticus. He put it in the Ten Commandments: the top ten for the common people. He stated and exhibited that those who ignored it were to be put to death. Talk about a non-negotiable!

He modeled it Himself in the creation account, resting on the seventh day not because He was tired, but because rest was worth building into the pattern from the very beginning.

And He didn’t stop there.

The festival calendar was structured around rhythms of work and rest woven through the entire year. Not one day off and then back to the grind indefinitely. A pattern. A pulse. Work and rest, work and rest, built into the fabric of how life was meant to be lived. The Sabbath wasn’t a restriction, or an excuse to waste time. It was a gift handed to people who had never been allowed to stop.

“Sabbath was made for man,” Jesus said, “not man for the Sabbath.” Rest exists to do good to you. Not as a checkbox. Not as something you earn at the end of a productive enough week. As something built into the rhythm of a life well-lived. Rest isn’t defiance of how you were made. It’s obedience to it.

And if that framing doesn’t land for you, here’s a bit of cold, hard science (because sometimes we need permission with footnotes.)

There have been a plethora of studies on the importance of rest, sometimes going so far as afternoon naps. It’s been shown to improve focus and memory on top of physical health. And, I’m sure, if you think back in your own life, you won’t be surprised to learn that studies have found that it improves patience and critical thinking, as well as general alertness. (If you want those footnote citations, you can find them, below.)

In short, rest is part of our engineering and design, and that’s not just a cute thought. We are meant to rest, and science is even finding that it’s suggested to take a full day of rest each week, which brings us full-circle back to the Sabbath.

And, for those like me that are tempted to look at resting as something lazy, consider this: ignoring a design feature doesn’t make you stronger. It makes you a machine running without maintenance.

The Right Sort of Rest

Now, don’t hear me wrong: there’s a difference between rest that serves forward motion and rest that’s just avoidance. A big difference; while both are real, only one is beneficial.

Strategic rest is planned, purposeful, restorative. It’s the rest you choose before your body chooses it for you. It looks like a nap on the calendar, a slow morning built in after a hard week, a day of rest when you feel your body fighting a cold, a boundary around the thing that always takes more than it should. It’s the rest you get to come back from.
Collapse rest is what happens when you ignored the strategic rest for too long. It’s not chosen; it’s imposed. It’s the floor of the sectional and the startle-awake and the toothless smile you almost missed. It’s the body collecting its debt in full, on its schedule, not yours.

Both happen.
Both are valid.
Not as equal choices, but as real experiences that don’t need to be shamed. The difference is what’s available afterward. Strategic rest leaves you with something to give. Collapse rest leaves you starting over, again, hoping the account has refilled enough to get through the day.

Practical Ways to Walk the Line

This balance can feel like something akin to a tightrope, and if nobody handed you a balance pole, it can be much harder. Here’s the closest thing I’ve got, built from trial and error and a lot of figuring out what nobody tells you:

Eat more when you’re doing more. More output demands more input. Literally, calorically, nutritionally. If your condition affects your appetite or your ability to eat normally, this is even more important to be intentional about, not less. You cannot run a body on less fuel while asking more of it. The math doesn’t work. Instead, eat good, whole foods that work with your body.

Rest more when you’ve pushed hard. These are not indulgences. This is basic accounting, and the books have to balance eventually. That can be a promise or a threat.

Break each big thing into what you have bandwidth for, today. Not what you had bandwidth for last Tuesday, not what you wish you had today, not what the person next to you has. Today’s capacity is the only honest starting point. What’s the one thing that moves the needle, given what you actually have to work with right now? No guilt; no shame.

Write down the taken-for-granted things, just to check them off. I’m a big list person, and on the days that are harder than others, that becomes therapeutic. Getting dressed is output. Making breakfast is output. Managing your symptoms, showing up for your child, answering that one email: these are output. They belong on the list. A day where you did those things and nothing else is not a wasted day. It is a day where the real work happened, invisibly, and you survived it. That counts more than many of us give it credit for.

Schedule rest like a task, not around tasks. If rest only happens in the gaps between everything else, it will never happen. Life has a way of leaving you no gaps, no “extra.” You get what you make time for, so rest goes in the plan first, not last. It is not the thing that gets cut when the day gets full. It is the thing that makes the rest of the plan possible. (I’m still learning this lesson, myself.)

Build a bad-day protocol before you need it. Decide now, on a decent day and with a clear head: what does a 10% day look like? What stays on the list? What comes off? What carries itself because your systems are already holding it? Make those decisions now, so that when the hard day arrives (and it will,) you are not making them in crisis, guilt, shame, or “ought to”s. If you’re like me, you’re a lot harder on “10% self” on hard days than easier days.

Get around a community that gets it and is going in the same direction. I’ve found that a lot of people you find on this journey fall into one of two camps. (And I say this with all the love in my heart for both of them): The “comfort label” crowd, and the “refuse to submit to reality” crowd. Both of these labels are a bit extreme, but you know who I’m talking about, don’t you? When you’re working on building something in a body with varying abilities, neither is helpful. You need to find people who can walk that line; who know when to encourage you to square up, and when to remind you that reality is still undefeated. Surround yourself with them. These are exactly the kind of people The Able Life Community is built around; those who hold the philosophy that rest and forward motion aren’t opposites. They’re partners. If that’s a group you’re looking to cultivate more relationships within, come join us.

Take Care of Your Tools

Come back to the floor next to the sectional, with me. My daughter is cooing, nomming a toy, completely content. I’m heavy-eyed, startling awake, wishing I had more to give her. Here’s the reframe I’m still learning to hold, and invite you into, too:

That wish isn’t evidence that I’m failing her. It’s evidence that I love her. And loving her well means loving her mother well. Being able to stay awake and play with toys, dance in the kitchen, and enjoy every milestone she hits? It requires that I treat rest as the input it is, not the reward it isn’t.

The version of me she deserves is the version that’s been maintained. That’s not selfish. That’s the whole point. There’s no more glory in finishing a race exhausted rather than merely winded. You don’t have to suffer more to be seen as worth taking care of.

Again, a lesson I am still learning.

So. Here’s my challenge to you: Plant one small reminder for yourself today. Not a grand overhaul or a complete restructure of how you do everything. Just one thing that honors the fact that you are worth taking care of.

A nap on the calendar.
A meal that’s actually enough. Or warm.
A boundary around the thing (or person) that always takes more than it should.

One small thing. Today. Rest isn’t falling behind. It’s what makes continuing possible. And continuing is the whole point.

And if you’re looking for a community like I mentioned above, one that celebrates every win including the ones that look like stopping? The Able Life Community is for people who are building something, at a pace that’s actually sustainable. Come join us.

And if you’re ready to build a planning system that has rest built in from the start, not squeezed in around everything else, but treated as the load-bearing thing it is, the Clarity Companion was made for exactly that, and you can find it in that Skool link.

The Able Life blog is written by a human brain with minimal help from AI, beginning to end. All em dashes, colons, bullet points, bolding, one-word sentences, bad jokes, and fragmentary logic are mine and mine alone. Thank you for joining us, and I hope this blog helped!