The Rest Revolution

Exploring burnout, inheritances, and the choice to move differently in midlife.

Burnout isn’t caused by overwork alone.

It also coincides with the wall you hit in midlife — when your self-sabotaging ways finally catch up with you, when the patterns you’ve been managing around for decades stop being manageable. Getting through it requires an honest look at how you got here and a real choice to move differently.

But here’s the part that doesn’t get talked about enough: burnout is also caused by the weight of expectations you inherited. From your family of origin. From your schools, your community, the era you were born into, and the beliefs that shaped that era. I call these inheritances. Whether it’s what your mother taught you about the value of hard work, or what your workplaces communicated over the years about your worth being tied to your ability to produce perfectly — when our inheritances don’t fit our personal truths, they become their own path to exhaustion. And they will keep draining you until you take the time to truly reckon with them.

That reckoning is what this Substack is about.

How The Rest Revolution came to be

The Rest Revolution started as a journalism beat when I noticed that my personal brand coaching clients were all dealing with a particular exhaustion during the pandemic. Looking for meaning and an outlet of my own, I started writing essays and reported pieces again — and landed freelance articles on burnout in The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, and The Los Angeles Times.

Then I had a fortuitous Zoom call with author Tina McElroy Ansa and her podcast co-host Wanda Lloyd. They’d read one of my essays in The Washington Post and reached out to have me on their podcast. Before we hung up, Tina said something that stuck with me: “Don’t write another article when you really want to write a book.”

From that point on I got serious about finding a longer form home for these ideas. When I was introduced to an editor at Wiley, I pitched my vision and The Rest Revolution book was born. It published in November 2024.

Since then I’ve had more thoughts, conversations, and ideas about the themes I covered in the book than I know what to do with. I completed a year-long mental health reporting fellowship through The Carter Presidential Center, writing about the mental health challenges of midlife high achievers for Forbes. The book feels like the beginning of a writing world — and this Substack picks up where the book and my Carter Center fellowship left off.

What we’re doing here

This Substack is a forum for a conversation with readers and thinkers who are wrestling with the themes of rest, work, ambition, and identity — especially at midlife. Because inheritances form a major root of midlife exhaustion, I’m weaving in personal essays about what I’ve inherited from the world that reared me, and the ongoing choice to hold onto my history or rewrite my narrative.

I write about my patterns and the cracks in the system and the regatta my son missed and all the specific, human evidence that the old way of operating has to change. I write about being perimenopausal and going down ADHD rabbit holes at midnight and what it means to be the human net at the bottom of my family catching everything before it falls. I write about the inheritances I’m still untangling and the rest I’m still learning to let myself have.

On ambition, and the pendulum…

Here is something else I know to be true about the kind of people who find their way here: you are not trying to stop achieving. You are trying to stop achieving at the expense of everything else.

High achievers live on a pendulum. On one side is the pull toward creating something new and meaningful — the idea that won’t leave you alone, the contribution you feel called to make, the next chapter you can see clearly even when you’re too tired to write it. On the other side is the crash, the overdoing, the season where ambition outruns your actual human capacity and the whole system pays for it. Most of us have spent our lives swinging between the two without ever learning how to slow the arc.

In The Rest Revolution I write about the wisdom of seasons — that no season is wasted, and that we cannot keep skipping winter rest any more than we can skip summer growth. The problem is that high achievers are very good at summer and very bad at winter. We treat rest as a gap between productive seasons rather than what it actually is: the condition that makes the next season of growth possible.

For fifteen years, my Package Your Genius framework has been the summer side of this equation. I’ve served as a thought partner to thought leaders who want to identify, shape, and share their life’s most meaningful contributions with the world. Packaging your genius is a healthy and essential part of The Rest Revolution. But the goal here is to help you do it sustainably. My current goal is to help you align your ambition and your visibility with your real human needs for joy, connection, and rest.

So from time to time, alongside the essays, you’ll find brand strategies, workshops, and frameworks to help you create and grow from a rested place. I’ll share strategies for the moments when your energy swings back toward the work and you’re ready to build something again. The pendulum is going to swing. I just want to help you be ready for both sides of it.

For paid members: The Sanctuary

As phase two of The Rest Revolution, I got certified in sound therapy through the Auster Sound Method. I wrote about sound baths in the book, and though I’ve been experiencing them for years for my own restoration, I finally decided to learn the art of facilitation so I could share this with the people around me.

As a paid subscriber, you unlock access to The Sanctuary — my growing digital library of recorded sound baths and somatic sessions. At this point I’m not just writing about rest. I’m curating experiences to help you find the stillness that embeds these ideas into your actual life.

I hope The Rest Revolution becomes your much-needed midlife off-ramp. A place to pull off the highway, gas up, and regroup before deciding whether the direction you’ve been traveling still makes sense for who you are today — and where you want your life to go.

Thank you for being here.

— Amanda

Amanda Miller Littlejohn is an executive coach, brand strategist, and restorative guide for high achievers. The author of The Rest Revolution (Wiley, 2024), she is a Carter Center mental health reporting fellow and a certified sound therapist. She lives and writes in Washington, D.C.