In a culture that celebrates hustle, productivity, and constant availability, sleep is often treated as optional. It's viewed as something to sacrifice in the pursuit of success or significance. But what if our approach to rest is shaping not just our health, but our spiritual lives as well?
In The Sleep You’re Longing For, Ken Wytsma invites readers to reconsider sleep not as a burden or weakness, but as a meaningful, God-given rhythm woven into the fabric of creation. Drawing from personal experience, theology, and practical wisdom, Wytsma offers a refreshing perspective: sleep is not just about recovery, it’s about surrender and learning to live within our limits.
In the following interview, Wytsma reflects on the deeper spiritual dimensions of rest, the challenges of insomnia, and how Christians can navigate a culture that resists slowing down. His responses offer both compassion and clarity, reminding us that even in our most restless nights, God is present and at work.
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Q: What is the number one thing you wish Christians considered when thinking about sleep?
A: There are two ends I would want people to hold together when they think about sleep. First, you are not broken if you struggle with it—billions of people do, and suffering has a way of making us feel uniquely alone. With sleep, that isolation is intensified in the quiet of the night, when you’re both exhausted and awake. But even there, sleeplessness can become a place of prayer, and sleep itself is something we bring before God. Second, we need to let go of the bravado that treats sleep as a weakness to overcome. When we constantly try to shave hours off our rest, we may gain a little in the short term, but we lose clarity, kindness, and eventually our own stability.
Sleep, at its best, is an act of trust. Each night we lay down our responsibilities and acknowledge that we are not the ones holding everything together—whether we feel weak and overwhelmed or strong and like we can take on the world. Sleep exposes how much we carry and that we require rest regardless of how much it is. If we could see sleep not as a limitation but as a form of surrender, it would begin to reshape how we think about control, identity, and even faith itself.
Q: How can sleep help us when the world feels so chaotic?
A: When everything feels unstable, sleep becomes one of the few rhythms that can ground us again. It doesn’t remove the chaos, but it restores our capacity to face it with clarity and steadiness. In the book, I talk about how the way we live our days shapes the way we experience our nights—and the reverse is just as true. How we sleep and choose to rest directly impacts what we are capable of doing with our bodies, our minds, and our souls. If the world feels stressful when we are rested, it will feel exponentially more so when we are not.
That’s why breaking the cycle requires some attentiveness during the day. We have to put things into perspective before we ever get to bed, creating the kind of internal environment where rest is actually possible. Sleep can help address chaos, but it isn’t something that grows naturally out of a chaotic life. Practices like gratitude begin to settle the mind, reminding us that not everything is unstable—that there are still moments of beauty, stillness, and grace woven into the world God created. Sleep provides a way of re-entering a chaotic world more whole.
Q: How have you been able to counter the productivity culture of the US and focus on rest and sleep?
A: For me, this shift didn’t start as a philosophical decision—it started as a necessity. My health forced me to confront the limits I had been ignoring, and over time I began to see how deeply I had internalized the idea that my worth was tied to what I could produce. Letting go of that has been a process. I’ve had to redefine success in quieter terms—faithfulness, presence, sustainability. Rest has become a necessity for me to be who I am rather than the thing to be ignored in pursuit of becoming something more. It takes a lot of time and constant prioritization to realign our lives to the God-given rhythms of creation. I’m not all the way there yet, but it’s now a central part of my life and thinking.
Q: What is your advice to Christians to who deal with insomnia?
A: I think it’s important to begin with compassion. Insomnia is not simply a failure to trust God—it’s often a complex mix of physical, emotional, and mental factors. At the same time, it can reveal the ways our minds struggle to let go, even when our bodies are exhausted. Rather than approaching sleep as something to force, I encourage people to lean into practices that create space—slowing down, quieting the mind, releasing the need to solve everything before morning.
We also have to have grace for ourselves. Fear and panic tend to tighten the very anxiety that keeps us awake, so learning to “try softer” can make a real difference. For many of us, insomnia didn’t show up overnight—it developed over time—and it often takes time for the body to relearn how to rest again. That’s where simple sleep hygiene practices can help: small, consistent changes to our environment and routines that signal to our bodies that it’s safe to sleep. And, as I detail in the book, there are therapists who focus on a niche of insomnia and sleep disorders and take a variety of health insurance policies. My first Zoom appointment with Dr. Babak Govan was a doorway to new beginnings for me.
Q: Is there a theology of sleep? If so, what would that look like?
A: For me, theology is simply learning about the nature and character of God—how we come to know him—by paying attention to the themes that run through Scripture. A theology of sleep, then, is what we can know about God through the lens of sleep, and also what we can learn about sleep by seeing it as God does. When we look at it that way, something as ordinary as sleep becomes surprisingly rich. God wired the need for sleep into our created bodies, and he reinforced it by commanding rhythms of work and rest. At the same time, Scripture makes clear that rest is not just personal but social—God consistently advocates for the vulnerable because the powerful have a tendency to exploit the sleep, rest, and humanity of others.
We also see that while rest is foundational, there are moments when something more pressing takes priority. Jesus stayed awake through the night in prayer and solitude, and anyone who has cared for a child knows that love sometimes overrides sleep. But even here, the broader pattern holds. When Elijah is overwhelmed with fear and anxiety, God doesn’t begin with a lecture—he lets him sleep and feeds him, preparing him to hear the still small voice. Sometimes we need to sleep on our anxiety and meet God where he wants to begin the conversation, rather than starting from our panic.
And still, the deeper truth remains: the Shepherd makes us lie down, even in the presence of our enemies, holding our fears at bay and keeping watch when we cannot. Scripture is also honest about how suffering—physical, mental, spiritual—disrupts sleep, as we see throughout the Psalms. There is so much to mine here. Sleep, rest, and peace run quietly through the biblical story, often just beneath the surface of its more dominant themes. Through a theology of sleep, we begin to see that God cares about our whole being, hears the cry of the weary, and meets us both in the night and in the rest that carries us through it.
