When I was six, I knew my auntie Amnetta was different. An international businesswoman; that’s what everybody used to call her. She had an aliveness and a joy the other women in our Sierra Leonean community didn’t have. She didn’t have a husband, and she didn’t have children. I didn’t know the words then, but she exuded a freedom that mums and aunties didn’t. I just noticed she lived a very different life to the other women I was growing up around.
I remember looking at her and thinking, “I want to be an international businesswoman so I can be like you.”
Why do some people get to take up space, and others don’t?
I carried that question into social work, a profession built on giving, showing up for others, and enduring. For a decade, I burned out, culminating in a panic attack outside a courtroom. I thought I was going to die. It wasn’t about the court case; it was everything. I realised I needed to do something about this.
Burnout and the myth of endless giving
As I started to learn about myself — about what was happening, about my relationship with overworking and people pleasing and how that had created an environment where I was just toxically productive all the time — I started looking around and seeing the same pattern reflected in all my female relationships. I could see it online. I could see it everywhere.
And I thought: well, if it’s not just happening to me, then it’s systemic. As a social worker, I was trained in systems theory. We’re not just looking at an individual, we’re looking at the family system, the community system. If there’s something bigger going on, it’s not that I’m defective; what’s going on around me is defective.
I wanted to do something about this. I wanted to have my own business.
Positive psychology was one of the things that had helped me recover. I didn’t even know the word “burnout” existed at that point. So I trained in psychology and coaching, set up my business, and started very experimentally.
I didn’t want to do one-to-one coaching at first. I didn’t want people’s problems. So I did things back to front: I started with a membership, which evolved into group coaching, which evolved into one-to-one. And I kept seeing the same two things popping up whenever women tried to live powerfully and joyfully: their heterosexual relationships, and their relationship with work.
I don’t know if I’d heard the phrase “toxic productivity” back then, but I was talking about it constantly without realising it. I was just saying what I needed to say.
Toxic productivity: the invisible chain
Toxic productivity is the obsessive need to be useful, to always be doing, even when it’s destroying you. It’s the friend who can’t sit still at dinner because she’s always flitting around clearing glasses, getting another plate, quickly running to the shops because she’s run out of sauce. It’s the colleague who gives 110% until she collapses, the mother who never rests. The person who can be dog tired on a lovely day and instead of enjoying it, think “I don’t want to waste the day” — as if the sun is never going to shine again. They can’t rest unless everything is done, because they feel it’s their duty to do everything. It’s a survival strategy, a numbing tool, and it’s praised as virtue.
One of the reasons it impacts women more is because we are exalted for how much we can do, particularly for how much we can do for other people. We see it every Mother’s Day in all those Instagram posts about how selfless someone’s mum is — not recognising that their mum is exhausted on top of exhausted. And frustrated. Resentful. Bitter, because she’s had to deny herself all the time.
Because of our so-called traditional gender roles, womanhood is tethered to martyrdom and sacrifice, whether you’ve given birth, raised children, or never had children at all. As long as you’re a woman, you’re supposed to be a martyr.
Then in a professional environment, we’re taught that being professional means being like a man. So it doesn’t matter if you’ve got period cramps from hell — conceal that, don’t let anybody know. You’ve got to be the same person all the way through the month, where our nature is not that at all. We’re only as consistent as what we did yesterday. During ovulation we’re capable of extraordinary things. But we hold ourselves to that standard all month round. The more we can be like men, the more stoic we can be, the more we can deny our humanity, the better.
And when we see other women say: do you know what, I’m tired today, I’m going to finish work on time — that breaks the social contract. We spit feathers. When women are overtly mean to other women, it’s because that woman is making them confront their cognitive dissonance. What we’re really saying is: you’re letting the side down.
Then add layers. If you’re a woman of colour, especially a Black woman, you’ve got to assimilate. One of the ways we do this is working twice as hard for half the recognition, without saying anything. Because if we say it, we’re arrogant. We’re showing off. We’re aggressive.
Women have been taught that our goodness rests on how much we’re able to suppress and deny our needs, and how convenient we can be to others. From a very young age, the message is: it’s okay for you to feel bad, but you must never look bad or make other people feel bad. That goes from our aesthetics right down to our behaviour.
I started talking about it everywhere: on Instagram, in conversations.
Then a publisher from Hachette DMed me saying he liked the conversation I was having about toxic productivity. He asked if I’d thought about writing a book. And I was like — am I talking about toxic productivity? I had to scan through my Instagram to check. Sure enough, I was talking about it all the time.
So I went off and wrote the proposal and found myself in the extraordinary position of having six publishers bidding for the book. I went with Hay House.
Writing Live, Laugh, Leave and doing this work helped me shed those stories that keep us in toxic productivity, and as I did so, my relationships shifted. The people in my life responded in various ways.
Some people couldn’t take me becoming who I am. They really needed me to be who they needed me to be. A 30-year friendship that was very close and intimate is now very distant. When we see each other, the love is there but the relationship has gone.
There was a phase where my mum would say, “You’re being like your dad.” My dad’s a default “no” person, he has a cantankerous streak. At first she found my new boundaries challenging. But then quietly, it guided her. She changed herself. Not because I was evangelising, but just because she’d seen something different was possible. And it brought out some envy in certain relationships.
But then there were people who came forward. People who were not only inspired but felt safe to be who they are. A couple of them reflected back such compassion and kindness that I thought: oh, that’s how I’m supposed to be treating myself. So I got closer to relationships that mirrored self-compassion, and that taught me what it actually looked like.
Some of the people who drifted away couldn’t take compassion. They could cope with: I’ve got a plan, I’m going to motivate myself, we move. But they didn’t like: I feel really fragile, I’m going to slow down. The final thing I said to the person I’m no longer close to was: I’m telling you I’m feeling low and you’re acting like I’m not turning up anywhere. I’m still going to work, I’m still showing up for parenting — I’m telling you I feel low. But you can’t see me outside of how you need me.
Sometimes you check in with yourself and realise: I’m triggering you just by being me. I’m not telling you how to live. I’m not saying what I’m doing is better. You asked me a question; I responded.
Breaking the social contract
There’s a social contract for women that we must endure. And if you decide you’re stepping away from that contract, that you’re not only not enduring but actively having a jolly good time, you become a threat. And people are going to have to reckon with the fact that yes, there are oppressive systems, but also, I’m internalising those systems and oppressing myself.
People don’t like responsibility. They much prefer to blame. When you’re running a business, making sure your cash flow is right, making sure your work is profitable — because this is the life you want to live — you’ve broken that contract. You’re showing people that they don’t have to be in the position they’re in. At some point, they have to face the fact that it’s a choice. And that’s too hard for many people.
It shows up as people pleasing and policing each other when our behaviour doesn’t match what we’ve been taught: this is how you get safety. This is how you get acceptance. It’s a nervous system response that gives us a false sense of safety. Which is why so many women won’t raise issues, won’t state their needs, and live a life full of elephants in the room. Because they’ve been taught that naming it makes it worse.
I’ve found the opposite. When conflict is handled with openness and curiosity, when we look at friction as an opportunity to repair, we often end up closer than before. Whereas if our unspoken agreement is to avoid and pretend, we don’t get any closeness at all. We just get distance wearing the mask of stability.
There’s no joy in that.
Joy as resistance and more than resistance
Joy is one of the premier nervous system signs of safety. And it’s not just in the mind, we experience it through our bodies. When we’re experiencing joy, the way we breathe changes, our heart rate shifts in healthy ways, we become more awake to our senses.
When I first started researching, I came across a biblical encyclopaedia called Theopedia. It describes joy as an orientation of the heart and a state of mind — something that creates a state of contentment, confidence, and hope. In polyvagal theory terms, it’s a ventral state: a place of safety and connection. And crucially, it’s the kind of safety that makes you feel safe enough to take the risk of being who you are. Of going for what you want. Of truly living.
We’re designed to meet our needs. And when our needs are genuinely met, the next natural state is joy. But society conditions us to defer: abandon your needs for this thing, then that thing, and one day, maybe when you retire, you’ll get to the joy.
The systems that oppress us — capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy — want us miserable. Miserable people are easier to control. On autopilot, not thinking, not advocating for ourselves, not saying: actually, no thank you. Actually, I’m satisfied. Joy makes us powerful.
I talk about what I call the pleasure-power axis. Men don’t have a corresponding organ built purely for pleasure. We do. We actually need pleasure. I think the people who were called witches were probably the ones who knew how to access that.
And I want to be clear: I don’t want joy to be framed only as resistance. One of the side effects can be resistance. But joy is mine first. That’s how I tell myself I’m alive. That’s how I tell myself I’ve got agency. That’s how I tell myself I’m powerful and that I care for myself. The ripple effect is everything else.
What would it look like to choose joy? Not as a luxury, but as a necessity and a birthright?