By Dr. Krystal Redman, MHA, DrPH
I’m writing this on the edge of a pause.
After years of leading public health and social justice work, I am preparing to take a sabbatical… an intentional, paid period of rest. When I shared this with other Black folx in my community, especially Black women, their reactions were immediate and telling.
Wait — you get a sabbatical?
And it’s paid?
AND,
Yesss! Take care of YOU!
Their surprise wasn’t about me. It was about how rare rest is for Black people, particularly Black women, cis and trans, queer Black women, and gender-expansive folx, who are expected to carry movements, families, institutions, and communities on our backs without pause.
In a society that has always extracted from Black bodies, rest is not neutral. It is an active form of resistance.
The Cost of Constant Survival
Public health has a name for what happens to our bodies when we live under chronic stress: weathering.
Coined by public health scholar Dr. Arline Geronimus, weathering describes the cumulative biological toll of racism, economic instability, and chronic exposure to stress on the body over time. Her research shows that Black women experience earlier health deterioration, not because of individual behavior, but because of prolonged exposure to structural inequity.
Weathering helps explain why Black women are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women in the United States, regardless of income or education (CDC). It also helps explain higher rates of hypertension, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disorders, depression, and anxiety among Black women across the life course (American Heart Association; NIH).
Weathering is not about resilience. It is about survival under constant threat.
For Black women leading public health and social justice movements, this pressure compounds. We are expected to be visionary and tireless. To hold community trauma while producing outcomes. To show up whole while being denied care ourselves.
The result is burnout disguised as commitment, exhaustion framed as virtue, and self-neglect masquerading as solidarity.
Rest Is Public Health in Action
We often talk about public health as policy, data, and interventions. But public health is also about conditions, the conditions that allow people to live, breathe, heal, and feel safe.
Rest is one of those conditions.
Chronic stress is directly linked to dysregulation of the nervous system, elevated cortisol levels, increased inflammation, and weakened immune response (Harvard School of Public Health). Conversely, rest; including sleep, reduced cognitive load, and intentional breaks, supports cardiovascular health, mental health, and long-term disease prevention.
But rest does more than regulate bodies. It restores humanity.
When Black people rest, we are not disengaging from the struggle. We are refusing the lie that our worth is tied to productivity, a lie rooted in capitalism and white supremacy.
Collective Care Is Not Optional
Rest is often framed as an individual act – a bubble bath, a day off, a vacation. But for Black communities, rest has always been collective.
It looks like aunties watching children so someone can sleep.
It looks like shared meals, laughter, prayer, and silence.
It looks like people stepping in so no one carries everything alone.
Public health research consistently shows that strong social support networks reduce mortality risk, buffer stress, and improve mental health outcomes; particularly for marginalized communities (NIH; WHO).
This is communal love and care. And it is public health in action.
Yet even within social justice organizations, rest is often treated as an exception rather than a standard. Sabbaticals are anomalies. Paid sabbaticals are rarer still.
That is not accidental. Nonprofit and movement spaces operate within the same capitalist systems that prioritize output over sustainability. Even “community” exists inside structures that can replicate harm if we are not intentional.
Why I Built a Sabbatical Policy
At SPARK, I helped create a sabbatical policy because our values demanded it.
If we claim to fight for bodily autonomy, health equity & justice, dignity, and liberation, our internal practices must reflect that. Sabbaticals are not perks. They are preventative care.
Organizational research shows that sabbaticals reduce burnout, improve retention, and increase leadership sustainability, especially in high-stress helping professions (Harvard Business Review).
I also recognize the positional power it takes to do this. Leadership has the ability (and responsibility) to model care, not just preach it. To normalize rest not as abandonment, but as stewardship.
And I want to be honest: taking this pause is uncomfortable. I’ve had to unlearn the belief that rest must be earned through exhaustion. That stepping back means letting people down. That survival requires constant motion. And the thought of sitting with and exploring “Who am I without the titles? societal expectations?… without the “work?”
Those beliefs are symptoms of the same systems we claim to resist.
And, well, honey, rest is “the work.”
Radical Rest as a Path Forward
Radical rest asks us to imagine a world where Black people are not only resilient, but rested. Where care is built into systems, not squeezed into the margins. Where movements are sustained by wholeness, not martyrdom.
This includes reproductive justice, a framework that demands we look at the full conditions of people’s lives. Reproductive justice cannot exist without addressing sexual oppression, economic exploitation, racialized stress, and the denial of pleasure, rest, and bodily autonomy.
Health is not only about access to care. It is about access to peace.
Rest will not dismantle white supremacy or capitalism on its own. But without rest, we will continue to lose our people to burnout, illness, and despair.
This is not a personal failing. It is a public health crisis.
As I step into this sabbatical, I’m holding it as both a gift and a political act. A reminder that liberation includes joy, slowness, and the right to pause.
This op-ed may be the first chapter of something larger, a book, a collection, a deeper exploration of what it means to build movements that don’t destroy the people inside them.
For now, I offer this simple truth:
Black people deserve rest.
Black women deserve rest.
Rest is not the opposite of resistance; it is how we survive it.
And survival, when it is collective and intentional, becomes freedom.