Tricia Hersey grew up on the South Side of Chicago, the daughter of a COGIC pastor, taught poetry in Chicago public schools, and earned a bachelor’s degree in public health from Eastern Illinois University before enrolling at Candler School of Theology at Emory University, where her graduate work focused on Black liberation theology, somatics, and cultural trauma. By the time she founded The Nap Ministry in 2016, she had spent years studying exactly how systems of oppression embed themselves in the body, and exactly what it costs a community to be told, generation after generation, that rest is something you have to earn.
The Nap Ministry’s first public nap experience was held in May 2017 in Atlanta. It was, and still is, part performance art, part spiritual practice, part protest. Hersey leads group naps in gallery spaces, on lawns, in workshops, inviting people, often Black women specifically, to simply lie down together and stop producing for a while. The idea sounds almost too simple to be radical. That’s the point. Hersey’s argument is that grind culture has convinced people their worth is measured entirely by output, and that this isn’t a personal failing or a time-management problem. It’s the direct legacy of two systems working exactly as designed: capitalism and white supremacy, both of which require bodies to function as tools rather than as ends in themselves.
Her 2022 book, Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto, took two years to write, largely during the pandemic, and became a New York Times bestseller within weeks of its October release. Structured in four parts, Resting, Dreaming, Resist, and Imagine, the book is dedicated to her ancestors, including Harriet Tubman and her own grandmother, Ora. “Rest is a form of resistance because it disrupts and pushes back against capitalism and white supremacy,” Hersey writes. “Both these toxic systems refuse to see the inherent divinity in human beings and have used bodies as a tool for production, evil, and destruction for centuries. Grind culture has made us all human machines.”
The response to that message wasn’t small. The Nap Ministry’s following grew from roughly 20,000 to 250,000 people during the pandemic, as exhaustion stopped being something people quietly endured and started being something they were finally willing to name out loud. Hersey followed Rest Is Resistance with The Nap Ministry’s Rest Deck: 50 Practices to Resist Grind Culture in 2023, and continues to speak, teach, and lecture at institutions from Brown University to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, in addition to opening a Rest Temple in Atlanta.
What connects Hersey to Howard Thurman isn’t incidental. Both trained formally in theology. Both came to believe that stillness isn’t a retreat from the work of justice but the precondition for it. Thurman built a church where the inner life and the outer fight were treated as one continuous practice. Hersey built a ministry on the same premise, just with a different sacrament. Where Thurman asked people to listen for the sound of the genuine within themselves, Hersey asks people to simply lie down and let their bodies remember they were never meant to be machines in the first place.
“It’s not normal to be sleep-deprived and exhausted, and to have tiredness as a lifestyle,” Hersey has said. That single sentence is the whole argument. For a community that has been asked to be resilient for centuries, Hersey’s contribution is the radical suggestion that resilience has a limit, and that rest, real, unearned, unapologetic rest, is not a reward. It’s a right.
