I used to think rest was something you earned after everything else was done, or when you will no longer breath, like my grandfather used to say. However, after more than two decades I’ve realized that the problem with preparedness is that nothing is ever really done.
There’s always another skill to learn, another project to finish, another scenario to plan for. The to-do list becomes infinite, and if you’re not careful, the pursuit of security becomes its own kind of prison.
It took a minor breakdown for me to understand this. I’d spent six months in constant motion and weekends disappeared into various prepping projects and garden work. Evenings went to inventory checks and gear maintenance. I felt productive and I felt prepared.
However, like nothing before, I also felt exhausted, irritable, and increasingly anxious. The more I was getting things done, the more disaster felt imminent and inevitable. Every delay in a project felt like courting catastrophe. I wasn’t preparing for an uncertain future anymore and I was living in constant crisis mode, and it was eating me alive.
My wife finally sat me down. “It seems like, you’re not preparing for when the SHTF,” she said. “You’re forgetting how to live.”
She was right and that conversation led me to one of the most counterintuitive but valuable practices in my preparedness journey: keeping a Sabbath.
What Sabbath Actually Means
Let’s clear something up immediately, I’m not talking about religion specifically, though the concept comes from religious tradition. You don’t need to be Jewish, Christian, or anything else to benefit from this practice. The Sabbath, at its core, is simply this: one day out of seven dedicated to rest, restoration, and stepping away from productive work.
The Hebrew word “Sabbath” means to cease or stop. Not because you’ve finished everything, but because you choose to stop. There’s radical wisdom in that distinction and stopping when the work is done is just exhaustion. Stopping while work remains is an act of trust and discipline.
For preppers, survivalists, and homesteaders, this may feel almost reckless. There’s always something urgent and the garden needs weeding, the food needs preserving and skills need practicing. How can you justify an entire day of rest when your family’s security might depend on what you accomplish?
Here’s the hard truth: running yourself into the ground doesn’t make anyone safer. Burnout doesn’t prepare you for crisis and chronic stress and exhaustion are liabilities, not assets. If you can’t maintain basic equilibrium during normal times, how will you handle actual emergencies?
The Physiology of Rest
Your body isn’t designed for constant activation and the human stress response evolved for acute threats: the lion in the grass, the hostile stranger and the immediate danger. Your sympathetic nervous system kicks in, flooding you with adrenaline and cortisol, sharpening focus, and mobilizing energy for fight or flight.
This system is brilliant for short-term survival, but it’s catastrophic when chronically activated.
Modern preparedness culture can trap you in perpetual low-grade stress and for most of you out there, you’re not facing immediate danger, but you’re constantly anticipating it. That background anxiety keeps stress hormones elevated, which has cascading effects: disrupted sleep, impaired digestion, weakened immune function, reduced cognitive performance, and eventually, serious health problems.
Rest isn’t optional maintenance and you must allow your parasympathetic nervous system to take over, allowing your body to repair, consolidate memories, process emotions, and restore energy reserves. Skip it consistently, and you’re degrading the very capabilities you’re trying to preserve.
Studies on athletes show that rest days aren’t when you lose progress, they’re when adaptation happens. The work you do breaks down tissue and depletes resources and only rest allows rebuilding and strengthening. Without it, you just accumulate damage and your body can’t endure it for long.
Your mind works the same way and constant problem-solving and vigilance deplete mental resources. Creativity, insight, and good judgment require a rested brain. The solutions to problems you’ve been wrestling with often appear during downtime, not during focused effort.
Mental Health in Uncertain Times
Let’s talk about something the preparedness community doesn’t discuss enough: mental health. This topic is hardly ever being debated and I’ve said it before that people should know what emergency preparedness involves, both physically and mentally.
There’s a particular kind of anxiety that comes with awareness and once you understand how fragile supply chains are, how quickly civil order can break down, how vulnerable infrastructure is to various threats, you can’t un-know it. That knowledge sits in the back of your mind, coloring how you see the world around you.
This awareness is valuable and it motivates preparation, but unmanaged, it curdles into something toxic. You start seeing every news story as confirmation that collapse is imminent and every setback in your preparations feels catastrophic. The future becomes nothing but threat and danger.
Psychologists call this “hypervigilance,” and it’s exhausting. Your threat-detection system runs constantly, finding danger everywhere and you can’t relax because relaxation feels like vulnerability.
A weekly Sabbath interrupts this pattern and it becomes scheduled permission to stop scanning for threats. For one day, you deliberately choose to trust that the preparations you’ve made are sufficient for right now. You step out of crisis mode and remember what you’re actually preparing for: a life worth living.
This isn’t naive optimism or denial, but rather acknowledging that your mental health is part of your preparedness. Depression, anxiety, and burnout are serious survival liabilities and in a real crisis, you need clear thinking, emotional regulation, and resilience. You can’t draw water from an empty well.
Spiritual Rest (Even If You’re Not Religious)
Spirituality doesn’t require belief in God or adherence to any religion. At its most basic, spirituality is about meaning, connection, and perspective beyond immediate concerns.
The preparedness mindset can become strangely narrow and everything gets evaluated through the lens of utility and survival. Is this skill useful? Does this purchase enhance security? How does this activity contribute to readiness?
These are good questions, but if they’re your only questions, life becomes cramped and joyless. You lose touch with beauty, wonder, gratitude, and connection for their own sake. You forget why survival matters in the first place.
Sabbath practice reconnects you with those deeper things. Maybe it’s time in nature with no agenda beyond appreciation. Perhaps it’s music, art, or poetry, or even unhurried conversation with people you love. For some it’s just quiet contemplation or prayer.
Whatever form it takes, it’s time spent remembering that you’re not just a survival machine. You’re a human being with a soul that needs feeding and the skills and supplies you’re accumulating are supposed to serve your life, not replace it.
There’s also something humbling and healthy about regularly acknowledging limits. You can’t control everything and you can’t prepare for every contingency and most certainly, you can’t secure perfect safety. Sabbath rest is weekly practice in accepting this reality without being paralyzed by it.
How to Actually Do This
The concept is simple, but the implementation takes discipline.
First, pick your day. It doesn’t have to be Saturday or Sunday. It just needs to be consistent. For most people, weekends make sense because they align with other people’s schedules, but if Tuesday works better for your life, claim Tuesday.
Second, define what “rest” means because traditional Sabbath practice prohibits work, which needs translation into modern context. Here’s a useful framework: stop doing anything that feels like obligation, productivity, or maintenance of your preparedness systems.
This means:
- No garden work (even if weeds are calling)
- No food preservation projects
- No gear maintenance or inventory
- No researching survival topics
- No practicing skills
- No preparing for disaster in any form
What you do instead is entirely personal, but it should genuinely restore you.
Some possibilities you could try:
Spend time outdoors with no agenda without foraging or identifying edible plants or scouting resources. Just being outside, paying attention and enjoying it. This is the one I’ve picked and I love spending time outdoors, regardless the reason that made me walk out the door.
Cook a meal that’s purely for pleasure, not efficiency or shelf-stability. Use ingredients you’d never stockpile, take your time and enjoy it.
Engage with art, music, or literature. Read fiction, listen to music or watch a move. Let yourself be moved by beauty. For me this comes second and if anything prevents me from going outside, I will rather read a book or watch a movie than do anything else.
Connect with people and have long, unhurried conversations. Play games and share meals. Focus on relationship, not networking or building community resilience.
Practice doing nothing. This is harder than it sounds and for some, sitting on their porch and their porch and watching clouds feels like wasting time. I encourage you to let your mind wander and resist the urge to be productive.
Whatever you choose, the key is that it genuinely feels restorative rather than draining. This isn’t about cramming your rest day with optimized recovery activities. It’s about stopping the optimization altogether.
The Paradox of Sabbath
Here’s what I’ve learned over years of practicing this: for me at least, taking one day off makes the other six days more effective.
When I was working seven days a week on various project, I was constantly tired. Projects took longer because I couldn’t focus and I made mistakes that created more work. I learned new skills slowly because my brain was saturated and I was busy but not particularly productive.
With a weekly Sabbath, I have more energy for the six work days and I think more clearly. I’m more creative in problem-solving and the physical work feels less grinding because I’m not chronically fatigued. I actually enjoy projects rather than grimly pushing through them.
The mental benefit is even more striking when you realize that the background anxiety about unfinished work and potential disasters gets reset. Monday morning, I can look at my schedule with fresh eyes rather than through the fog of obsessive worry. I can distinguish real priorities from anxiety-driven busywork.
Relationships improve too and my family gets at least one day a week when I’m fully present, not distracted by the endless to-do list. That matters more for our long-term resilience than an extra batch of canned goods or another practiced skill.
Rest as Resistance
There’s something quietly radical about choosing rest in a culture obsessed with productivity and it’s even more radical in preparedness culture, where rest can feel like irresponsibility.
But consider this: the dominant narrative of our time is that you’re never doing enough, never prepared enough, never secure enough. There’s always more to fear, more to accomplish, more to acquire. This narrative serves many interests, but your wellbeing isn’t among them.
Sabbath rest is a rejection of that narrative. It’s claiming that your worth isn’t measured by your productivity and it’s asserting that security isn’t found in perfect preparation but in resilience, adaptability, and inner resources that can’t be stockpiled.
It’s also acknowledging a fundamental truth about survival: the goal isn’t just staying alive. It’s living a life worth the effort of sustaining. If your preparation for hard times makes normal times miserable, you’ve already lost something important.
What It Looks Like Long-Term
I’ve been keeping a weekly Sabbath for five years now and for me it’s become non-negotiable, right up there with eating and sleeping.
Some weeks it feels easy while other weeks, especially when legitimate deadlines loom or real problems need solving, it feels almost impossible. I do it anyway and I realize that those difficult weeks are often when I need it most.
The practice has fundamentally changed my relationship with preparedness. I still learn skills, maintain supplies, and think about resilience, but it’s no longer driven by fear and compulsion. It’s become a steady, sustainable practice rather than a frantic race against imagined disaster.
I’m better prepared now than I was in my seven-day-a-week phase, not because I’m doing more, but because what I do is more thoughtful, deliberate, and effective. Turns out a rested person makes better decisions than an exhausted one.
More importantly, I’m living the kind of life I’d want to preserve in a crisis and I’m connected to people I love. That’s what Sabbath has taught me: the best preparation for an uncertain future is a well-lived present, and that cannot be accomplished without rest.
