There’s a Nap for That!

Why funding sabbaticals is on the rise

In our Trend Tracking series in Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s (RWJF) What’s Next Health publication, we reflect on emerging technologies, social practices, and cultural currents that have the potential to increase or hinder health equity.

Today, we’ll hear from Jessica Clark, who served as the futurist in residence at the RWJF from 2022–2023, and heads up Dot Connector Studio, a Philadelphia-based foresight and strategy firm.

So, how are you feeling? If your answer is “exhausted and overwhelmed,” you’re not alone. According to CNN Business, a recent Gallup poll found that across the globe, people are “disengaged with their work and increasingly fighting with their bosses.”

But help might be on the way: Over the course of the past few years of pandemic chaos and social unrest, calls for paid opportunities to rest and recuperate have grown louder — especially among activists and care workers who are Black and were working on the frontlines of multiple crises. Advocates for taking the time to retreat and restore our energy and balance are now hitting their stride: publishing books, organizing for labor reforms, and also just unapologetically taking breaks for themselves.

What’s driving this trend?

Compensated time off is a scarce commodity. The average American worker gets only 11 paid vacation days per year. Many lower-income workers don’t even have vacation or sick time. Longer sabbaticals tend to only regularly be available to academics or the fortunate senior managers who can negotiate them as a perk. Meanwhile, activists, caregivers, essential workers, and others whose labor contributes to society battle burnout with no recognition of their unpaid toil and no relief in sight.

How does this relate to health equity? Rest is integral to both mental and physical wellness, and in the long term, work-related stress can lead to persistent sleeplessness, changes in appetite, and depression. Mothers in particular found themselves juggling caretaking and work responsibilities during the pandemic, leading to a spike in “mom rage.”

Younger generations are also bearing the brunt of growing up in volatile and exhausting times. Even in the decade before the pandemic, feelings of persistent sadness, hopelessness, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors increased by about 40% among young people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They’re responding through viral acts of resistance — such as the TikTok trends “bed rotting,” which celebrates lounging around as self-care, and “lazy-girl jobs,” which prioritize work-life balance over the striving “girlboss” mode.

For several years, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Pioneering Ideas for an Equitable Future team has been watching and supporting exploration of the burgeoning movement to secure more time off, through scanning the horizon for signals, grant-making, building off of hunches, and discussing insights gleaned from grantees.

Scanning the horizon

Often a particular thinker or organization will suddenly surface again and again as the avatar for a trend. In this case, the name that popped everywhere was organizer, artist and theologian Tricia Hersey — founder of the Nap Ministry and author of the 2022 New York Times bestseller, Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto.

Hersey, who as an undergrad majored in public health, recently released The Nap Ministry’s Rest Deck. These cards break down her ideas into bite-sized prescriptions for “deprogramming from grind culture,” and making space for dreaming and collective liberation. “I will unravel from urgency,” reads one. “Rest is my foundation to build, invent, restore, and imagine the world I want to see,” reads another.

Trends are often just the most visible manifestation of many minds, and decades of effort. Hersey’s work builds upon a critique of capitalism and “white supremacy culture” — a term that has gained currency among advocates for racial equity. The term was first introduced in a 1999 article written by Tema Okun in collaboration with Kenneth Jones, informed by the work of other colleagues in the Dismantling Racism training collaborative. One key characteristic defined in the original article is “urgency” — a critique that Okun clarified in a recent interview with The Intercept is not simply about the ubiquitous crush of deadlines, but the ways in which a need for speed is used as an excuse to ignore bias.

“[W]hen everything is urgent, then it’s so easy for racism to perpetuate itself,” Okun explained. In contrast, “if I can allow some spaciousness in the way that I approach my work, or what I’m responsible for, often things happen that wouldn’t have occurred…so I’ve come to really value that spaciousness because of what can emerge if I can allow the urgent voices inside me to just take a nap and see what might be possible.”

Another key concept that undergirds calls for rest among communities of color is racial trauma — the cumulative burden of dealing with discrimination on a daily basis. This drains people — symptoms can include hypervigilance and insomnia. “Just being Black makes you tired,” as Dr. Michael LeNoir, an Oakland-based allergist and pediatrician told Vox News in a recent issue on discrimination produced with Capital B.

Many also take aim at a commodified wellness industry that places the onus on individuals to shoulder “self-care” rather than acknowledging larger systemic pressures and racial biases. “Marginalized communities are central to today’s radical rest movement,” observed Ian Kumamoto for Mic in a 2022 piece tracing this trend’s trajectory, noting that related social media campaigns “center the exhaustion of Black and brown people in America, for whom resting has seldom felt like an option.”

So-called “hustle culture” is also a burden for people with disabilities. Activists from this community share the perspective that calls for rest go hand-in-hand with social change. For the disabled community, and marginalized groups at large, it’s less about that 4pm nap, and more about taking up space — radically existing, without contingencies,” writes Chloe Johnson, a UK-based reporter who deals with various chronic illnesses. “Prioritizing rest where we can and encouraging the same in others is fueled by a dream of living in a world where resting without repercussions is not just an option for those with the privileges to do so.”

Articles such as this add specificity and dimension to the broader conversation about “the Great Resignation” that dominated headlines in recent years. From concerns about Zoom fatigue to calls for a four-day workweek, China’s “lying flat” protesters opting out of toxic productivity to experiments in providing universal basic income to support caregivers, it’s clear that working ourselves to the bone so that companies can profit is no longer tolerable.

Slowly but surely, some employers are beginning to respond. In February, the Washington Post reported an uptick in paid sabbaticals. The number of LinkedIn users ticking the “career break” status on their profiles also increased, showing that gaps in employment are becoming more normalized.

Insights from funders and grantees

So, signals that rest is becoming important and possible abound. But how can philanthropy respond to this trend — in particular, to support health equity and social justice?

For the Center for Effective Philanthropy Abby Siegel, who is a program associate Hyman of the Healing Trust, offers five steps for funders considering setting up a sabbatical program for grantees. “In our own sabbatical program, we’ve seen time and time again that rejuvenated leaders return to the work renewed and ready to instill new wellness policies and procedures into their organization, shifting the culture of the organization from a top-down approach,” she writes. “Our partners often return to the office ready to implement their own sabbatical policy to benefit their staff.”

Washington state seems to be a hotspot for this type of work. Last September, the Washington Women’s Foundation announced a $1 million fund to support “Rest and Repair Awards” to 10 Black women working in nonprofits that serve under-resourced communities. These unrestricted awards are “intended to give the Black women who receive them the resources to find ease and wellness, to rest and repair.”

Also in Washington state, foundations are supporting a $1.37 million fund for leaders of color to take sabbaticals, administered by the BIPOC-ED Coalition. Jodi Nishioka and Andrea Caupain Sanderson are two of the co-founders. In a Seattle Times op-ed, they make the case that BIPOC leaders need sabbaticals for “sleep, physical activity, and mental, emotional, and social recovery,” observing that “Centuries of systemic racism have created stark economic limitations, multigenerational trauma, and health inequities including the disproportionate impacts of COVID-19 — all contributing to severe psychological stress in BIPOC communities.”

In working with RWJF grantees, the Pioneering Ideas team is hearing many of these themes and concerns echoed — both in formal grant proposals, and in strategy conversations. It’s now more common to hear that a leader might be taking a sabbatical to rest or renew, for example, or that entire organizations are building line items in to provide such breaks for their teams.

Some RWJF grantees are tackling the issue head-on, such as social scientist, movement lawyer, and policy strategist Ifeoma Ike. Her firm, Pink Cornrows, received a planning grant to design their vision called “Radical Sabbatical,” a concept and conversation guide focused on securing support for more women, femmes, and nonbinary folks of color to access rest regardless of their profession, with particular attention to the needs of social activists. Read a fascinating interview with Ike in RWJF’s 5 Questions For… series.

Too often, Ike suggests, sabbaticals are elitist. “Somebody is determining who gets a break, and who deserves rest. Somebody is determining that our type of labor — the type of labor that more often falls to Black and Brown women — does not qualify as worthy of getting a break. And the historical context of all of this is racialized capitalism, which is the formation of our society and is still the bloodline of our society.”

Her project will bring experts in labor, organizing, human rights, social science, medical, and community-building together in design labs. Together they’ll explore strategies to support wellness, rest, and quality of life. In addition to investigating methods to democratize rest, the project aims to observe what sort of creativity might be unleashed among participants.

In the spring, the Design Justice Network also launched an exploratory process with support from the Pioneering Ideas team, focused on “designing and dreaming liberatory cultures of care.” Targeted to sustain the wellbeing of changemakers within social movement spaces, this project will support the creation of “Care Pod” experiences with people practicing design justice within organizations and movements. Members of this network include individuals and organizations that have signed on to a set of principles that guide practitioners to center community input in design processes that range across visual culture, software, community planning, and beyond. Learn more about the genesis of this approach, and the network’s Care Pod Team.

Another recent grantee, the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute incorporated concepts of rest throughout their practice. The institute, which has now wrapped up its work, was designed to expand on the work of adrienne maree brown and numerous collaborators of color over many years. “Emergent strategy” is an approach to social change that marries insights from speculative fiction, the science of complexity, and patterns learned from the natural world. Designed as an antidote to “the competitive, power-over, urgency culture of capitalism,” this offers the a set of core principles, including:

• There is always enough time for the right work.
• Less prep, more presence.
• Move at the speed of trust. Focus on critical connections more than critical mass — build resilience by building relationships.

To put these into play, with RWJF funding the Institute incubated a set of “praxis” projects. One was a transmedia series titled Levels and Bosses, designed to challenge the prevailing competitive norms of digital games, and provide participants with the chance to practice nonbinary vocabularies and non-violent interactions. Caretaking and sustainability are built into the experience, which offers options such as rest, deep listening, and camouflage as actions for users to take.

Following our hunches

The foundation’s Share Your Hunch site offers a window onto emerging trends, which often start as just flickers of curiosity and possibility. I took a look to see how the need for more rest began to surface over time. The hunches I found suggest that even before the pandemic, our culture of overwhelm was taking a toll:

August 2019: I wonder if…it might help to give workers a work life balance sabbatical — half time work for a couple of months to help them get their priorities in order

May 2021: I have a feeling that…people are so burned out from responding to the uncertainty and stress of the pandemic (in their professional lives and personal lives) that it will not be easy to create/expand on new ways of doing business in the immediate future.

October 2021: I’m noticing that…the exodus of people leaving not only jobs in general, but out of the helping/health professions is intense. I wonder how this is going to impact the way we think about “care,” acceleration of robotics and AI, etc. Concerning hunch.

June 2022: I’m noticing that…in healthcare there are not many benefits for employee wellness after a person quits working for an organization. I’m worried about the healthcare workers that were so burned out that they no longer could work. I wonder if they are able to get help when they need it.

June 2022: I have a feeling that…the Great Resignation will impact how Gen Z/Alpha thinks about its work

April 2023: I’m noticing that…despite the many elevations of “burn out,” employers are pushing staff to work harder, work more, and more urgently. Burn has been raised in 100 percent of the big picture conversations I’ve had in 2023. It is reinforcing production as king without regard to human well-being

May 2023: I’m noticing that…rest and labor and solidarity are all concepts that are connected.

September 2023: I have a hunch that…we need to have reset points in our political, economic, and personal systems. Whether it’s an election, or term limits for leaders, or loan forgiveness at Jubilee, or a sabbatical or a sabbath—the ability to start afresh stops bad habits and bad actors from becoming entrenched.

This trend is clearly gaining momentum—a healthy development for all of us.

What hunches do you have about what it would take to secure a future in which all people are well-rested — and what they could then accomplish? Share them here. New to sharing hunches? Check out this video.

Learn More:

• The Equity Mindset: Designing Human Spaces Through Journeys, Reflections, and Practices, Mahogany Books, September 2023
• “Invest in rest: Funding sabbaticals,” Center for Effective Philanthropy, September 2023
• “What is mom rage, actually?” The New Yorker, September 2023
• “5 Questions For…Ifeoma Ike, What’s Next Health, August 2023
• “A racist society is detrimental to your health,” Vox, July 2023
• “The “lazy-girl job” is in right now. Here’s why,” Wall Street Journal, July 2023
• “ Radical rest: How slowing down can change everything when you’re disabled,” Cosmopolitan, July 2023
• “Is bed rotting really a form of self care?” House Beautiful, June 202
• “Workers are historically stressed out and disengaged,” CNN Business, June 2023
• “How to differentiate between real self-care and faux self-care,” Reader’s Digest Best Health, May 2023
• How Americans View Their Jobs, Pew Research Center, March 2023
• A growing movement of sabbaticals for BIPOC leaders, NPQ Quarterly, March 2023
• “Average PTO In The US & Other PTO Statistics (2023),” Forbes Advisor, March 2023
• “This isn’t the ‘end of ambition’ for young Americans. It’s a redefining of it.” Washington Post, February 2023
• “Tema Okun on her mythical paper on White Supremacy,” The Intercept, February 2023
• “The nap bishop is spreading the good word: Rest,” The New York Times, October 2022
• “The future of work is no work,” Yes! August 2022
• “The rise of radical rest,” Mic, August 2022
• “Why is exhaustion so normalized for Black women?” Allure, June 2022
• “Your body knows you’re burned out,” New York Times, May 2022
• “The radical act of rest: BIPOC leaders need breaks for renewal,” The Seattle Times, June 2022
• “The impact of racial trauma and how to cope,” Verywell, May 2022
• “BIPOC mental health trends and disparities,” Anxiety and Depression Association of America, April 2022
• “Inside the nation’s largest guaranteed income experiment,” Time, September 2021
• The ‘lying flat’ movement standing in the way of China’s innovation drive, Brookings’ TechStream, July 2021.

The views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.