Treatmebetta

Are you tired? I be tired. The weird thing is, when we lay down, most of us think we’re resting. But we’re not. We’re collapsing at the end of the day into a scroll, a show, a drink, even a plate of food we don’t even taste. Then we call it rest because it looks like stillness from the outside. 

It isn’t rest though. It’s numbing. And numbing isn’t just a weaker version of rest. It’s often worse than getting no rest at all because it convinces you that you’ve recovered when you haven’t. Then you get up and go right back out and spend energy you never actually replaced.

And here’s the kicker: For Black women, rest has never been treated as a right. It’s been treated as a reward. It’s something we earn after everything else is handled, which for most of us means never, because there’s always something else to do. So, we’ve quietly substituted the appearance of rest for the real thing, and we pay for that substitution in our health, our relationships, our joy, and — this is the part almost nobody talks about — our money.

Rest and Numbing Are Not the Same Thing

Rest is restorative. It replenishes something. Numbing is avoidant. It dulls what you’re feeling without ever processing it, which means the thing you’re trying to escape is still there, fully intact, waiting for you the moment the numbing wears off.

A nap is rest. Falling asleep with the TV on because you couldn’t face another minute of your own thoughts is numbing. A quiet morning with your coffee is rest. Four hours of scrolling that leaves you more agitated than when you started is numbing. Real rest leaves you with more capacity than you had before. Numbing leaves you with the same depletion, plus the time you spent not addressing it, plus whatever new problem the numbing itself created — the money spent, the sleep lost, the relationship, the studying, the cleaning, the dreaming, the planning, or whatever it was that you neglected while you were checked out.

This distinction matters because a lot of us believe we’re resting. We point to our couch time, the show we binged, the hours we spent doing “nothing,” and we wonder why we’re still exhausted. It’s because none of that was actually rest. It was avoidance wearing rest’s clothes, and avoidance doesn’t restore you — it just delays the bill.

What Chronic Rest Deprivation Actually Does

Sleep researchers have been clear for years that the body and mind don’t distinguish between “too busy to rest” and “resting the wrong way.” The physiological consequences of insufficient real recovery are the same either way. The gap is stark and CDC data from 2024 found that 40.2% of Black adults reported short sleep duration, compared to 28.9% of white adults — a disparity tied less to individual habits than to the accumulated demands, stress, and structural conditions many of us are navigating daily. You may have heard the term weathering? If not, click here. 

Your chronic lack of rest and under-recovery elevates stress hormones, weakens immune function, impairs decision-making, and accelerates the kind of wear on the body that shows up later as chronic illness, not just tiredness. The physiological mechanism behind this has been well-established for years and to my knowledge hasn’t been overturned by newer research: CDC research on sleep loss has found that even a single night of restricting sleep to four hours can cut natural killer cell activity — a key part of your immune system’s ability to fight off illness — by nearly a third. 

Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry, a rest-as-resistance movement for Black communities, has spent years making exactly this argument to Black communities specifically: Rest is not a luxury or an indulgence. It is a form of resistance against a culture that has profited from our exhaustion for centuries. 

The need for rest is not abstract. It shows up as brain fog that makes you slower at the exact tasks you’re trying to power through. It shows up as a short fuse with people you love — I know this one too well! — because a depleted nervous system has less patience for anything. It shows up as getting sick more often, healing more slowly, and aging faster than your actual years. It’s the same weathering pattern that chronic stress produces more broadly, except numbing accelerates it instead of interrupting it because your body never actually gets the recovery it’s owed.

The Joy You’re Not Actually Experiencing

How does rest apply to joy? I’m so glad you asked. Joy requires presence, and presence requires a nervous system that isn’t perpetually running on fumes. When you’re operating from chronic depletion, even good things — a vacation, a celebration, a quiet evening with someone you love — get experienced through a fog instead of fully felt. You’re there but not really because you’re too tired to actually enjoy the thing you worked so hard to get.

This is one of the cruelest parts of the pattern: You spend years grinding toward moments of joy, and when you finally arrive, you’re too depleted to feel them the way you meant to. Numbing makes this worse, not better, because it trains your nervous system to expect low-grade stimulation instead of real engagement. That means even genuine joy starts to feel muted, because you’ve spent so long dulling everything else that dulling has become the default setting.

What This Costs You Financially

This is the part that rarely gets connected to rest, and it should. Chronic exhaustion is expensive, in ways that compound quietly over years.

It shows up in decision-making. Depleted people make worse financial decisions — impulse purchases, missed details on contracts, poor negotiating because you don’t have the bandwidth to advocate for yourself the way you would if you were actually rested. It shows up in the numbing itself: the money spent on things that dull rather than restore — the shopping, the takeout you ordered because cooking felt impossible, the subscriptions and impulse buys that quietly drain accounts while doing nothing to actually address the underlying depletion. That spending pattern deserves its own honest look, because it’s rarely about the item — it’s about trying to numb an exhaustion that item was never going to fix.

The cost of poor rest shows up longer-term too, like career terms: Burnout drives people out of roles they were otherwise excelling in. It derails promotions, and cuts short earning trajectories that would have compounded for years if exhaustion hadn’t forced an exit or a downshift. Real rest allows you to sustain the level of focus, creativity, and stamina that actually builds wealth over time. Numbing, by contrast, just delays the collapse — and delayed collapses tend to be more expensive to recover from than the ones you could have prevented with rest in the first place.

Why We Reach for Numbing Instead of Rest

Numbing is faster, more available, and doesn’t require you to sit with anything uncomfortable. Real rest often does because slowing down enough to actually recover means slowing down enough to feel whatever you’ve been trying to outrun. For a lot of Black women, that’s precisely why numbing wins by default: It’s the path that doesn’t ask anything of you emotionally, while real rest sometimes does.

There’s also the conditioning. Many of us were raised believing rest has to be earned. Society often manufactures and disseminates strong messages that suggest a Black woman stopping before everything is handled is a form of failure or laziness. So instead of resting on purpose, we collapse by accident, at the end of a day we pushed through entirely on will, into whatever requires the least effort — and that is almost never actual recovery. Self-sabotage often hides here too. Meaning we avoid real rest because some part of us doesn’t believe we’ve done enough to deserve it yet.

It will take time for you to unlearn this conditioning — I still work on it to this day — but it’s a worthwhile effort. Trust me.

What Actual Rest Looks Like

Real rest is active. It requires intention. It isn’t just the absence of work — it’s the presence of something genuinely restorative, and that looks different for different people. I think that’s part of the reason generic advice about rest often fails to land.

For some of us rest is physical: sleep that’s actually protected, not just squeezed into whatever’s left of the day. For others it’s sensory: quiet, low stimulation, an actual break from screens and noise instead of trading one form of stimulation for another. For others it’s social rest — time away from performing, from managing how you’re perceived, from being “on” for anyone. And for many of us rest is creative or spiritual — the kind that comes from making something, praying, sitting in silence, or simply being still enough to hear your own thoughts rather than drowning them out.

The test is simple, even if the practice isn’t: Did this effort to rest leave you with more capacity than you had before, or did it just pass the time while the depletion stayed exactly where it was? If it’s the second one, it wasn’t rest, no matter how restful it looked.

The Truth About Rest for Black Women

Rest was never supposed to be something you negotiate for, apologize for, or squeeze into the margins of everything else you’re expected to carry. It’s not a reward for good behavior or a luxury for people with easier lives. It’s maintenance — the thing that makes every other part of your life actually sustainable, including your health, your relationships, your joy, and your money.

Numbing will always be more available than real rest, because it asks nothing of you. But it’s also quietly more expensive because it never actually pays down the debt — it just adds interest while convincing you the balance is handled. I write about the things that prevent the average Black woman from enjoying rest in Live Well: A Black Woman’s Prerogative, along with the difference between the coping mechanisms that look like self-care and the practices that actually are because that distinction changes everything about how sustainable your life actually becomes.

Know this: You are allowed to rest before you’re depleted, not just after. You’re allowed to protect your rest the way you’d protect any other finite resource. And you’re allowed to stop mistaking numbing for recovery because the version of you who’s actually rested — not just checked out — is the one who gets to build the life you’re exhausting yourself trying to reach.

Share in the comments: What does real rest actually look like for you, versus what you’ve been substituting for it? Share this with a woman who’s still waiting until everything is handled before she lets herself stop.

Want a deeper look at building a life that doesn’t require you to run on empty? My book Live Well: A Black Woman’s Prerogative walks through the mindset shifts and daily practices that make sustainable rest — not just numbing — possible. Get your copy here.