Explainer
Care
Creed
6 min read

Bed rotting and an old art of rest

In a culture where “exhaustion is seen as a status symbol,” bed-rotting is an emerging trend. Lianne Howard-Dace reflects on self-care and how to rest and refresh.

Lianne Howard-Dace is a writer and trainer, with a background in church and community fundraising.

a sleeper pulls a blanket up over their head.

There’s a trend doing the rounds on TikTok which is attracting a fair amount of comment; the practice of taking (at least) a day in bed to recuperate when you’re running low on energy. Gen Z are - with characteristic directness - calling it ‘bed rotting’.  

At first, this sounds like nothing new. People have been taking to their bed for centuries. Gen X might’ve called it vegging out, millennials would call it a duvet day.  

From the discourse that’s sprung up about bed rotting though, it seems like some bigger questions are being explored around this trend. Firstly, Gen Z are reclaiming the need to stay in bed by branding it as a form of self-care. This picks up on some broader wellbeing trends online, where people are trying to decouple their sense of worth from their productivity. This train of thought picked up steam during the Covid-19 pandemic, and seems to continue to be something people are wrestling with. 

As others are pointing out... is getting to the point of needing a day to rot in bed is really a good approach to self-care?

I rather like the visceral nature of the phrase ‘bed rotting’ and I’m sure that, whichever generational cohort we fall into, we can all relate to the occasional need to totally switch off to refresh and recalibrate. However, as others are pointing out, a second consideration is whether getting to the point of needing a day, to rot in bed, is really a good approach to self-care. Or would more preventative measures be the better way to care for yourself? Some commentators on TikTok have suggested that a combination of other gentle activities would actually be better at delivering the desired results than lounging in bed alone. 

Dr Saundra Dalton Smith suggests in her book Sacred Rest that there are seven types of rest: physical, mental, spiritual, emotional, sensory, social and creative. Whilst bed rotting provides perhaps three or four of these types of rest, it may not provide the long-term refreshment sought if it doesn’t nurture the other parts of us as well. 

Should we all just be expected to mindfulness our way out of a mental health crisis or yoga our way out of chronic pain? 

While framing this extreme need for rest as self-care may give people permission to stop and reduce the stigma of doing nothing, it also puts the onus on the individual. I think the risk of self-care narratives in general is precisely in the focus they put on the self. While it can be healthy and empowering to take action to improve your wellbeing, it also draws attention away from the societal systems and structures that are contributing to everyone feeling so exhausted all the time. Should we all just be expected to mindfulness our way out of a mental health crisis or yoga our way out of chronic pain? Or should we be looking more widely at what is going on in the world? 

This tension between taking responsibility for my own wellbeing but also reflecting on how I relate to the wider concepts of work, productivity and success is a very live, everyday issue for me. I have fibromyalgia, a chronic health condition characterised by fatigue and widespread muscular pain. Whilst conventional medicine gives some relief, I have to manage my energy levels very closely and intentionally pace myself to avoid my symptoms flaring up, though sometimes it is out of my control.  

Unfortunately, if I were to let myself get to the point of desperately needing to bed rot it might take me a week or two to fully recover. I have to resist the urge to say yes to every invite and make sure I have a balance of work, rest and play in each week. This is helped by the privilege of being able to schedule my work around my own needs, it would certainly be much harder if I was tied to a very strict working pattern. In a way, it's like I have an early warning system for burnout, and I’ve become very attuned to fluctuations in my mood, energy or pain levels that might indicate the equilibrium is off. 

As part of my energy management strategies, I have also found that the ancient practice of sabbath from the Judeo-Christian tradition has helped me to both take regular time to rest and to remind myself that I am a human being, not a human doing. 

In Genesis, the opening poem of the Hebrew scriptures, we hear that after six days of hard work creating the universe, God rested on the seventh day. For thousands of years, Jews and Christians have attempted to learn from this and incorporate a day of rest into each week. The practice also exists in Islam.  

 

Each Sunday I try to do as little as possible and particularly to disconnect from digital channels, because I know they often take more energy than they give me. 

The way that this plays out in people’s lives ranges from very strict observance to more loosely held rules and rituals. However, you approach it, there is much to be learned from this ageless wisdom. I initially began practicing sabbath myself when I went freelance and realised how easily I could end up working seven days a week if I didn’t pay attention. This was six months or so before the first Covid-19 lockdown in the UK and I was extremely grateful to have established this habit in my life when that occurred. 

For me, sabbath isn’t just ensuring I’m squeezing rest into each week but also creating rhythm. It punctuates my week and gives everything else breathing space. Each Sunday I try to do as little as possible and particularly to disconnect from digital channels, because I know they often take more energy than they give me. 

In The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, John Mark Comer helpfully suggests two simple criteria to decide whether something is permissible on the sabbath. Is it rest or worship? If it’s not one of those two things then it can wait. For me, worship usually means going to church, but for you that could be something else that helps you connect to something bigger than yourself and experience a sense of wonder. Perhaps immersing yourself in nature, or engaging with an awe-inspiring work of art.  

Another helpful piece of advice about sabbath I heard from Annie F. Downs on Instagram:

“If you work with your hands, sabbath with your mind. If you work with your mind, sabbath with your hands.”

As someone who spends most of my working week creating content on a computer, this is a useful reminder not just to read and journal on my sabbath but to swim, crochet or cook as well.  

Lastly, Jesus said “The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath”. This reminds me to do sabbath in a way that is life-giving for me, even if that looks different to what works for others. These guidelines have helped me establish a practice of sabbath which provides clarity and routine, whilst being expansive enough to allow me to give myself whichever type of rest I need at a given time. Occasionally I do just bed rot, but usually I do things that restore me and bring me joy, whether that’s taking a walk or cycle if I have the energy or simply taking my lunch to the beach. 

Of course, I’m not always perfect in the way I sabbath. That’s why it’s called a practice. But I do notice I flag later in the week if I’ve skip it. So, even if I occasionally switch the day or bend one of my rules for a practical reason, I keep coming back to it.  

If you don’t already, I really encourage you to try the routine of sabbath for yourself. Pick a day of the week that works for you, put some boundaries in place, try it for a few weeks and adjust accordingly. Treat it as an experiment, a gift to yourself and perhaps as a little way to opt out of the madness of modern life for a beat. And by all means, bed rot if you need to. As Brené Brown says:

“It takes courage to say yes to rest and play in a culture where exhaustion is seen as a status symbol.” 

Essay
Books
Creed
Easter
Poetry
7 min read

Of trees and truth: Tolkien on cultivating greenness

The literature of Herbert, Lewis and Tolkien all helps us see the seen and unseen better.

Jim is Director of the Marion E. Wade Center and Professor of English at Wheaton College, where he holds the Marion E. Wade Chair of Christian Thought. 

a row of flowers with green stalks and blue flowers.
Isabella Fischer on Unsplash.

Each Easter season I return to a poem called “The Flower,” written by the Anglican priest George Herbert and published shortly after his death in a collection called The Temple. In both its growth and its withering, the flower of the poem represents the poet’s spiritual life, and the verses speak powerfully to the renewal that only God can bring. “The Flower” opens in joyful exclamation— 

“How fresh, oh Lord, how sweet and clean  

Are thy returns! even as the flowers in spring” 

—but my favorite image appears at the start of the second stanza, where the poet marvels,  

“Who would have thought my shriveled heart 

 Could have recovered greenness?”  

C.S. Lewis took note of the second stanza as well. At the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College, Illinois, where I work, we care for nearly 2,500 of the books that Lewis had in his personal library, many of which include his notes and underlinings. Lewis’s copy of The Temple is no exception. The back pages of the book contain a carefully constructed index in Lewis’s own hand, and one of the index entries points us back to the concluding words of the second stanza of “The Flower.” Turning to the poem, we find a hand-drawn line, very likely added by Lewis himself, running down the page alongside the stanza. I find that line to be heartening—a pointer, perhaps, to a shared interest. And though the connection between poem’s verses and the book’s appearance is purely coincidental, I appreciate the fact that Lewis’s copy of The Temple has a weathered green cover.  

What I love about “The Flower,” and about Herbert’s poetry more generally, is that it helps us see the seen thing better, helps us pay attention to it, so that we may glimpse the unseen thing. By bringing the flower into clearer focus, Herbert helps strengthen the eyes of faith. Herbert does not present nature itself as divine—the flower is a metaphor, after all—but he does represent nature in ways that point to its beauty while testifying to who God is and who we are in relation to Him.  

How during this Easter season might we recover greenness in Herbert’s sense? The poetry of The Temple is an excellent starting place. But if you are looking for another literary guide, I recommend turning (or returning) to another writer whose works we collect at the Wade Center—J.R.R. Tolkien. Should you visit the Wade to pore over the annotations in Lewis’s books, you’ll also have the chance to examine the small oak desk upon which Tolkien penned The Hobbit.  

In a note to his American publisher in June of 1955, Tolkien wrote,  

“I am (obviously) much in love with plants and above all trees, and have always been; and I find human maltreatment of them as hard to bear as some find ill-treatment of animals.”  

The parenthetical “obviously” is significant. Though Tolkien didn’t view The Lord of the Rings as autobiographical, he was willing to admit that his love of plants and trees was on full display in his life and work.  

Tolkien’s faith was on display in his writing as well, as Holly Ordway argues in her remarkable book Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography. Ordway’s first chapter begins with Tolkien’s own words on the matter: “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.” As with Tolkien’s “obviously” so too with his “of course.” After calling our attention to the latter, Ordway persuasively demonstrates the truth of Tolkien’s words, exploring in detail how his religious convictions and practices were indeed fundamental to him and his work. “The Lord of the Rings is not an allegory of the Gospels or a tale didactically expressing Christianity,” she writes. “Rather, the whole world of Middle-earth and everything in it is infused with, rooted in, its author’s Christian vision of reality.” 

Ordway’s metaphor of rootedness is a fitting one, and—in our pursuit of Herbert’s greenness—it is worth exploring the entanglements between the obvious and fundamental aspects of Tolkien’s work: his love of “growing things” (to borrow a phrase from Treebeard) and his faith.  

Consider a few of the trees that we find across Tolkien’s writings.  

In his poem “Mythopoeia,” Tolkien responds to C.S. Lewis’s view (before Lewis converted back to Christianity) that myths are beautiful yet untrue. Tolkien begins the poem among the trees, expressing Lewis’s views as follows:

“You look at trees and label them just so,

(for trees are ‘trees’, and growing is ‘to grow’).”

The problem with viewing nature in such purely naturalistic terms, Tolkien goes on to suggest, is that it ignores the origins of terms like “tree.” It leaves out the humans who name the things of the world and develop myths about them and, more importantly, it leaves out the Source of such creativity. For Tolkien, human creativity finds its beginnings in God, and we reflect Him through acts of sub-creation. Thus he writes,  

“The heart of man is not compound of lies, 

 but draws some wisdom from the only Wise, 

 and still recalls him.”  

Whether it is the simple act of identifying a tree by name or the complex development of stories across time and place—what Tolkien describes elsewhere as “the intricately knotted and ramified history of the branches on the Tree of Tales”—our creativity flows from, and is a form of reverence for, the One who created all things. 

In The Lord of the Rings, we encounter not just trees but also the tree-like Ents. Referring to himself and the other Ents as “tree-herds,” Treebeard explains to Merry and Pippin that the Ents help the trees grow and develop:  

“We keep off strangers and the foolhardy; and we train and we teach, we walk and we weed.”  

In line with Ordway’s quotation above, Tolkien’s Ents are not meant to be read allegorically; however, the tree-herding activity of the Ents reinforces the theme of stewardship in The Lord of the Rings—a theme that echoes Scripture’s call to humans to care for creation and, just maybe, encourages us to take up similar work in our own places. (For further encouragement along these lines, check out Kristen Page’s book The Wonders of Creation: Learning Stewardship from Narnia and Middle-Earth, which grew out of Page’s lectures for our annual Ken and Jean Hansen Lectureship at the Wade Center.)  

And in Tolkien’s short story Leaf by Niggle, we encounter an artist desperately trying to work on his painting of, yes, a tree. This tree stands for our efforts to create art, which, though frequently frustrated and often motivated by self-interest in this life, may be purified and brought to fruition in the age to come.  

Tolkien’s trees testify to the beginning, middle, and end of Christian story. Among their roots and trunks and branches, we encounter illustrations of his views about creation, the proper ways to care for it, and its culmination.  

In a 1945 letter, Tolkien told his son Christopher about an essay by Lewis on the truth and beauty that we find in the story of Scripture. In the essay, which Ordway observes is likely his piece “Myth Became Fact,” Lewis argued that people of faith are, in the words of Tolkien’s letter, “meant to draw nourishment from the beauty as well as the truth” of the story. But what of the person without faith who “clings” only to its beauty? According to Tolkien, Lewis maintained that such readers “still in that way get some nourishment and are not cut off wholly from the sap of life.”  

Greenness for Herbert is ultimately the Lord’s doing. We should seek, therefore, to find nourishment in the truth and the beauty of Scripture, the source of the sap of life. Growing things spring up from these pages as well: fruit trees and fig trees and oak trees and olive trees; vines and branches; a new shoot springing forth from a stump, a crown of thorns, the wood of the cross. And as the Psalmist reminds us, the one who “meditates day and night” on the law shall be “like a tree.” When we read and digest the Word of life, we grow greener.   

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