Debbie Lucas is the Joy Alchemist for women who want to rebuild self-trust, intuition and joy when life looks fine on the outside but feels overwhelming on the inside.
Her work focuses on burnout, emotional sustainability and creating success that actually feels good to live.
High-performing women in tech are hitting the milestones they set out to achieve, but many are quietly feeling flat, exhausted and disconnected at the same time.
On paper, everything looks successful: fantastic salaries, promotions and influence in an industry that hasn’t always made space for them. Internally, however, it can feel very different, with anxiety, overthinking, and emotional fatigue all sitting there in the background everyday.
The culture of the tech world doesn’t really help this, it rewards speed, performance and constant output. Over time, you learn to override yourself to keep up. Fatigue gets pushed aside, you talk yourself out of doubt and that feeling of “this isn’t quite right” gets ignored because it’s inconvenient.
If you’re good at doing that, you tend to get further. You get recognised for being someone who can handle a lot. Someone who just gets on with it, but that’s also where things start to catch up.
It’s not usually one big burnout moment, it builds slowly and the same pattern that helped you succeed is the one that keeps running in the background. Your body is giving you signals, but you’ve become used to not really listening and while your intuition is there, it’s not the loudest voice anymore.
When things start to feel harder, most of the solutions offered don’t really address this.
Yes, mindfulness apps, wellbeing perks, resilience workshops can help a bit in the moment, but they sit on top of the same environment that’s creating the pressure in the first place. So it becomes about coping better, rather than actually changing anything underneath.
There’s also very little awareness of what the pressure to deliver and perform is doing to the nervous system. Constant output, high expectations, very little space to pause, and there’s no doubt that it has an impact as you can’t out-think that with a breathing app.
You start to see it in decision-making as well; things that used to feel simple start to feel heavier. There’s more checking, more second-guessing, more looking outside yourself for reassurance and even small decisions can feel like they carry more weight than they should. This creates a low-level tension that just sits there all the time and even when things are going well externally, it doesn’t always feel secure internally.
Joy is barely part of the conversation in these environments, it’s usually something for outside of work. Something you get to once everything else is done but actually, it plays a much more practical role than that as it helps regulate your system, creates a bit of space and makes it easier to think clearly and make decisions without everything feeling so heavy.
Rest and pleasure shouldn’t be seen as ‘nice to have’ but as part of how you keep going without running yourself into the ground. When that’s missing, everything takes more effort, as work feels heavier as does leadership and while you can still perform, it costs more.
Rebuilding that comes from slowing things down enough to actually hear yourself again. We need to notice the difference between a clear “no”, a “not yet”, or just something that doesn’t feel right and letting that information matter, instead of immediately pushing past it.
There’s also something here for the tech industry to look at more honestly. If the environment only rewards output and speed, then this pattern will keep repeating.
We need to create space where people can pause, question things and actually say when something isn’t working and that’s part of sustainability, not a nice extra. Sustainable leadership is about how steady you are while you’re carrying it and being able to pause when you need to.
Having boundaries around your time and energy are key and not needing to push through everything to prove that you can.
If success depends on ignoring yourself, it’s always going to feel a bit unstable, even if everything looks fine from the outside. Real stability comes from being able to trust your own internal signals, not just your results, and that’s probably where things are starting to shift.
This is not about doing more, but in no longer needing to override yourself in order to succeed.
