Reclaim the Sin of Sloth: The Case for Radical Self-Connection

Cherishing rest and unhurried introspection isn’t just for the old — it’s for the wise!

As the calendar flips to January, the pressure to "start the year with a bang" can feel overwhelming. Messages about resolutions, boot camps, and productivity hacks flood our feeds, urging us to hit the ground running. But what if you slowed down this January instead of sprinting forward? What if rest and introspection could be acts of resistance against our relentless hustle culture? What if embracing the so-called sin of "sloth" is exactly what your body, mind, and spirit need?

This article first appeared in shorter form in Katie Couric Media, January 1, 2025

Speaking of sin… After a holiday season that likely saw you indulging in a fair share of gluttony (festive feasts), greed (gift exchanges), and perhaps even a touch of lust (seasonal pleasures), it might seem counterintuitive to recommend giving in to yet another one of the 7 deadly vices. But sloth, as misunderstood as it may be, offers a unique pathway to balance and wholeness. Resting isn’t laziness — it's a profound act of self-care that replenishes our nervous system and has the potential to foster a sense of collective transformation.

And for some of us, resting is hard work. I’m a mission-driven Capricorn who’s been hustling since birth. (Literally — I was born prematurely on December 27th, eager to get started, and then chagrined to find that baby Jesus and Christmas had already stolen my spotlight.) But as I’ve journeyed into midlife, I’ve embraced the value of slowing down.

While working on The Pink Zones project, centred on what helps women thrive as they age, I’ve been interviewing women older and wiser than myself and researching what it means to live a meaningful, healthy, and joyful life into old age. The message is clear: A rich existence isn’t made by pushing harder, optimizing more, or clinging to an endless “to-do” list of self-improvements.

I now see rest and introspection as essential practices we must build into the fabric of our lives — well ahead of elderhood. Rocking in chairs, mulling over memories, daydreaming, looking at the sky, or simply cherishing the unhurried present isn’t just for the old — it’s for the wise! Taking the slow track is a way to live a vibrant life in a world worth savouring.

So, if you're ready to embrace rest as your top resolution of the year, let me share some compelling perspectives — and some simple yet transformative ways to get your “still” on.

Subverting the sin of sloth

This past year, I attended a retreat in North Carolina with

Elise Loehnen

and Courtney Smith. Elise is the author of the New York Times bestseller, On Our Best Behaviour, The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good. In it, she explores how cultural narratives — particularly around the seven deadly sins — shape women’s lives. Her opening chapter begins with Sloth and sheds some light on how we come to see our need for rest as a failing. She writes: “Good women are tireless and hardworking, with no professed interest in or requirements for rest, either at work or at home."

I’m a bit of a retreat junkie, (which isn’t lost on me as ironic). But the stillness provided by “time out and away” in the serene centre high above the misty Blue Ridge Mountains (*see image below) brought some profound clarity. It sparked personal and professional epiphanies—not just for me, but for the many remarkable, motivated (and mostly overextended) women alongside me. So impactful, we began to gather monthly with Elise and Courtney, exploring tangible tools to begin to dismantle the self-imposed "taxes" we pay in our relentless desire to be good.

In my clinic work as a Naturopathic Doctor my work is to identify and treat the “underlying root causes”. I frequently see women who present with complaints of burnout manifest as exhaustion, low mood, and disrupted sleep. While I run conventional and functional labs to rule out anemia, thyroid issues, or HPA axis dysfunction and will recommend herbs, adaptogens, or hormones to refill an empty cup, the trickier work lies in addressing the actual leaks that don’t have tidy reference ranges listed as pmol/litre found through bloodwork — the over-giving, the self-imposed demands, the self-abandoning and the frank absence of rest. Getting under the hood of our “operating system” is far more confronting and cannot simply be written on a prescription pad. The antidote to this doesn’t come in a bottle on a shelf: It requires courageous introspection and the time that so few of us seem to have — or are willing to spend. Here lies the rub.

The transformative power of rest

At times in my work, I had a sense that I was an enabler, using the tools of functional medicine to help people keep on keeping on when their bodies just really needed to stop – and to be tended to more gently. This concern was reinforced when I read the revolutionary work of Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry and author of Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto. In it, she argues that rest is a subversive act with the power to alter our society.

Hersey challenges the idea that we pause simply to recharge, to then plug back into the productivity machine. Kind of like my “retreating” followed by the resumption of “regular programming”. She critiques society’s obsession with busyness and reframes rest as an act of defiance against capitalism, white supremacy, and grind culture. Rest, she argues, is not a luxury but a path to liberation, healing, and reclaiming our humanity. It is a practice that connects individuals to themselves thereby enabling the collective to envision and create a more just, empathetic world. (Imagine a society in which all the members were well-rested. The decrease in road rage alone would be profound.)

There are many ways to look under the hood of our challenges with rest. Elise Loehnen approaches from a white feminist perspective, asking the very profound question, “Why do women struggle to allow themselves to rest?” Tricia Hersey’s framework is rooted in Black womanist and intersectional analysis, focusing on privilege and systemic inequities, asking, “Who gets to rest?”

Systemic barriers to rest are real.

In discussing rest, it is essential to acknowledge that the many systemic barriers to rest disproportionately affect marginalized communities.

Black liberation activists and writers like Tricia Hersey, Prentice Hemphill (whose work on embodiment and finding a healing home), and Adrienne Maree Brown (whose work centres on pleasure activism) have profoundly shaped my awareness and current perspective on what operating beneath the surface that needs dismantling for all of us to be whole. This questioning began during highschool when Indigenous thought leaders and activists prompted me to look through a different lens than the one I grew up seeing through. Then I had the opportunity to study with First Nations scholars and community members as part of a unique undergraduate program at Trent University, a small liberal arts school in Ontario. Inspired and guided by an activist professor, I became involved in various groups and gatherings around the time of Mohawk Resistance at Kanesatake (known in the media as the “Oka Crisis”) which allowed me to spend time in small communities and gain perspectives that deeply shaped my understanding of many issues that went under the surface of what was presented in the media.

Since then, I have continued to be influenced by First Nations healers in my own personal healing and continued studies as a practitioner. Mostly these are people who quietly and potently “doing” the work rather than writing books and going on a speaker’s circuit. There are however some incredible Indigenous luminaries and healers who are more public-facing and web-reachable such as Dr. Rosales Mesa, who offers a course on decolonizing your mind and Panquetzani, who has many on-line offerings through Indigemama and recently published a book on Thriving Postpartum. Both visionary healer-leaders highlight the potent restorative power of cultural and communal practices rooted in their respective traditions. All this to say, systemic inequities —and the wisdom required to address them—extend far beyond what I can fully explore here, but they remain foundational to understanding the deeper work of rest as both personal and collective restoration

As a white feminist, I approach this conversation from a perspective shaped by my work as an naturopathic physician doing “functional medicine” and my background and experiences in Cultural Anthropology/Native Studies and participatory action research in the Canada’s North, Denendeh (NWT) and Nunavut. I recognize that this lens reflects my lived experience and privileges.

Still, I deeply value the work of those who have illuminated these issues, and whose traditional medicines included deep reverence and a sense of reciprocity for the land, water, sky, all the creatures on the earth and a tending to spirit. I believe that building a more balanced and equitable world fundamentally begins with connecting to ourselves and our souls through small, consistent practices—actions we can integrate into daily life to support both personal and collective well-being.

There are simple habits used across cultures, geographical locations and time that can make your body a more welcome, tended and grounded home to safely return to daily, no matter the external circumstances. For millennia, humans have worked in alignment with diurnal cycles and used rituals—like attuning to natural rhythms (moving, dancing, breathing, and honouring sunrise and sunset and seasons)— to co-regulate with nature, creativity, ourselves, and each other. (I will write about how to implement a “Bookending the day” practice that supports this in my next post). Suffice it to say that hustling to make it to an early morning yoga class in a studio to do sun salutations isn’t necessary and might even be counterproductive. Rather, I want to suggest some practical ways to help you settle, recalibrate your nervous system and create the space to build solid scaffolding- a requisite for introspection, connection, wholeness and sustainable change in the next year, and beyond!

Make rest a habit!

● Take a nap.

● Look out a window—focus on trees, noticing if there is wind or the movements of birds or other life outside.

● Take in—really observe a sunrise or sunset.

● Deep belly (or diaphragmatic) breathing

● Take savasana: in Sanskrit this means, corpse pose, lying on your back, a common resting asana (pose) done at the end of a yoga class

● Legs-Up-The-Wall pose (a restorative yoga pose where you lie on your back with your legs up the wall at a 90-degree angle)

● Gratitude or Prayer: Reflect on moments of gratitude or engage in a spiritual practice that resonates with you.

● Sit with a hot tea and your hands around the warm mug, taking in the aroma and daydream.

● A Hot Bath: Add Epsom salts, rich in magnesium, to relax your muscles and nervous system. Pair this with a guided meditation or audiobook for an immersive experience.

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Rest isn’t just about recovery; it’s a prerequisite for growth and transformation. So, this January, I (ahem) “challenge” you to commit to doing absolutely nothing — or at least, to doing less. As Hersey argues, rest is more than a means of personal renewal: It’s a collective necessity for a more compassionate and just world. Sloth has never looked so divinely ordained.

Blue Ridge Mountains above Boone, North Carolina

If you’re enjoying being part of my beginning journey here— and, if you’re reading this, you are already a part of this adventure — I’d love for you to leave a comment, or share this post. And if you’re reading this in email, please always feel free to hit reply and send me a private message that way. I’d love to hear from you.

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