You’re supposed to be sleeping, but what you’re doing is lying there in the dark thinking about all the things. Why did I say that stupid thing in the meeting today? Is that chicken still good or does it have to get cooked tomorrow? Did the permission slip get signed for the field trip? And crap, I forgot to call mom back!
That’s the mental load, and it’s why you’re so tired. This isn’t about better sleep or having more downtime. It’s about the things you don’t realize you’re carrying. Today you’re going to learn what mental load really is, why it doesn’t get one bit lighter when somebody offers to help, and five things you can do about it.
15-minute read
What Is the Mental Load?
The mental load is the thinking work behind the doing work. It’s the running list of what needs to happen, who needs what, and what’s coming, and that list is always running in your head, even when you’re not thinking about it!
Think about having thirty tabs open on your computer. You’re only using two of them, but your computer is slow, and it’s taking forever to do the simplest thing. But you can’t close one tab and have that fix the issue because one tab isn’t the issue. It’s having all thirty open at the same time. Think of your mental load as all those open tabs.
What I call your emotional bandwidth is equivalent to your computer’s memory, or your RAM. It’s how much your machine, your brain, can hold open at once before it starts to lag. So, your bandwidth isn’t about how much you can get done; it’s how much you can take in and respond to before you start dropping things, snapping at people, or shutting down completely.
And everybody has tabs open. We know from the research that the mental load shows up for dads, moms, for single parents, and for anybody caring for someone else. But it also shows up if you live alone and don’t take care of anybody else. Yes, single people with no kids have a mental load too, and it’s just as valid as everyone else’s. For me, if I’ve got something I can’t handle, I can hand it off to my partner or even one of my grown kids. But if you live by yourself, there’s nobody right there to catch the thing you drop, so the monitoring you need to do to make your life work never gets a break. It’s not less than what a mother of three is carrying; it’s just a different set of tabs.
Maybe you’re the adult child in charge of a parent, so you’re holding the medication list, the insurance nonsense (at least here in the US), the appointments, and which doctor said what, all in addition to the rest of your own life. Maybe you’re the roommate who’s the only one who knows when the rent is due. Maybe you’re the one person in a friend group who notices when it’s been too long, which is the only reason that group still exists. Different tabs, different amounts of memory, same problem.
I’m going to use a lot of examples of mental load with couples today, since that’s the complaint I hear most, but I’m also going to give love to you if you’re single with no kids, so know that all the information today will be useful no matter your situation.
The 4 Parts of the Mental Load
There’s recent research showing the mental load breaks down into four parts.
- Anticipating. Noticing that something is going to be needed before anybody says it out loud.
- Identifying your options. Figuring out what could be done about it.
- Deciding. Picking one of the options and committing to it.
- Monitoring. Checking that the thing you decided got done and then checking again.
Deciding is the part everybody can see, and it’s also the part that gets shared with others most often. The anticipating and the monitoring are where all the weight is, though, and those are the two that nobody else can see (sometimes that includes you).
I want to take a moment to tell you about a client I have (we’ll call her Jennifer). Jennifer is married, has two kids, and hates dinnertime and everything attached to it. Her husband, who’s a good guy and was trying, said what most partners say: he’d make dinner; it’s fine, no big deal. But the actual making of dinner isn’t really the issue. It’s the grocery shopping and figuring out the meals everyone will eat so she doesn’t have to make different meals for each person. It’s knowing that the meat in the fridge has to get used by Tuesday, so the chicken has to wait until Friday. It’s remembering that their son is getting a cavity filled at three o’clock, so his mouth will be sore, which means tonight’s dinner has to be something soft or he won’t eat and then he’ll be up late because he’s hungry and cranky. And guess who’s going to be up with him?
This isn’t about just “making dinner.” What’s funny is that Jennifer actually likes cooking; she finds it Zen. So, the physical making of the dinner isn’t what she really needed help with. She wanted help with everything else related to dinner. Her mental load is about carrying a whole working model of her household and dinner. All day, all the pieces are running in her head, updating all day long, and her husband was offering to execute one small piece of a system he wasn’t running. That’s why the offer didn’t help her, and it’s also why she couldn’t explain what was wrong with it without sounding like an ungrateful person who turns down help.
And this is what makes it different from being busy. Physical work ends, because you do the dishes and the dishes are done (at least until dinner). The mental load is invisible. It has no boundaries, and it never finishes because it goes to work with you, it comes on vacation with you, and ultimately, it keeps you up at night.
Why Doesn’t It Help When Someone Helps?
Say you’re a woman in a heterosexual relationship. There’s a kid up at two in the morning with a fever, and your partner is the one who gets up. That’s real, and I don’t want to take it away from him, but it’s like cooking the dinner.
Why? Because your partner gets a lot of credit from coworkers (why are you tired, Mitch? Oh, you were up with your son last night? You’re such a great dad)! But guess what? Yes, he got up, but was there Tylenol ready to give your kid (and was it the grape-flavored kind because your kid hates the cherry flavor)? Did he know where it was? Was there a thermometer available and those little disposable caps that go on the end? Who called the school attendance line the next morning to say your kid was home sick? Who stayed home with them? Who decided whether to call the doctor or get on the phone with the advice nurse the following day? Who remembered the last time they were sick like this, they had an ear infection, and exactly when that was? Who remembered to cancel the piano lesson they had that next day or coordinate getting their homework sent home from school? Who made sure their favorite brand of soup was already in the house and ready to open in case they got sick?
The ten minutes of getting up in the night are the only part of that whole chain that isn’t the mental load.
Here’s the word I want to take away from both of you, and I say this with love: Helping. You don’t help with your own job. Nobody says they’re helping with their own work; they just do their work. The second somebody is helping you, the job (and the entire mental load) is still yours. So, if your partner ever asks if they can help you with something, it means you carry the mental load for that thing. Stop right now and think of how many things fall into this category…
Why Is the Mental Load So Exhausting?
The you walking out the door at seven in the morning is a completely different person from the you walking back in at six at night. You’re not naturally meaner, more impatient, or less motivated later in the day, so what gives?
Your tabs. Some of them do close, because you handled the thing and it’s done. But new ones open all day long, faster than you’re closing them, and the ones that stay open are the ones you’ve got to keep track of. So, by six o’clock you’ve got less RAM free to run anything new, and the same request that was easy at nine in the morning is genuinely too much now.
And your tabs don’t close overnight either, which is why you might already be grumpy nine in the morning. If you went to bed with your mom’s diagnosis open, and the tuition bill open, and that thing your kid’s teacher said open, you woke up with almost nothing free. It was never about what time it is. It’s about how much is already running.
The real problem is that you plan your day in hours instead of basing it on your bandwidth. You think, I’ve got five hours until bedtime, so I should easily be able to do dinner, monitor the kids’ homework, answer those emails, and take a walk (and maybe even have some rock star sex). But it’s not about how much time is left in your day; it’s how much mind is left in your day.
So, you get a few of those things done (definitely not the rock star sex, because you’re not in the mood for even amateur singer sex by 10:00 pm), and all you want is to veg out on the couch with wine, your phone, and your show going in the background. You had time left but no bandwidth left. And you see where that leads you.
And this costs you more than energy. Research on this has found that when you’re the one solely responsible for running things, it’s tied to lower satisfaction with your life, feeling emptied out, feeling overloaded by your role, and, if you’re in a relationship, being less happy in it. So when you snap about dinner, it was, of course, never about dinner.
Why Can Some People Do More Than Me?
Not everybody is working with the same amount of RAM.
For example, if you have chronic pain, studies show it’s eating your attention and your memory all day long. Or maybe you have a mental health issue, such as anxiety, depression, or a substance use disorder. Maybe you have a learning disability, or you’re a highly sensitive person. Maybe you’re having trouble finding a job. Maybe you’re working full time and going to school at night. Maybe you’ve got kids, or you’re not sure whether you want kids. Maybe you’re not sleeping well, or you’re constantly on some diet because your weight won’t stay put.
And some of it is the shape of your day rather than a diagnosis you might have. If you’re an introvert in a job where you’re on all day, you’re paying for those eight hours in a way your extroverted coworker isn’t, for the exact same eight hours. If you’re the one in your family who handles the doctor’s appointments in your second language, that’s costing you in ways nobody is counting. Are you getting the idea?
Now, some people wake up with more bandwidth than others. They’ve got plenty of headspace, plenty of RAM. The good news is that you can build your emotional bandwidth so you have more of it.
Sleep is the big one when it comes to waking up with a full tank of gas, so to speak. There are a lot of studies showing that losing it costs you attention and working memory the very next day. Exercise does it too, and not just in the moment. Research shows that moving regularly changes how much mental load you’re able to hold over time. Another way to increase your emotional bandwidth is mindfulness and meditation. When researchers pooled together more than a hundred trials, mindfulness training improved attention, working memory, and cognitive control. And, yes, I also wish the answer was staying up all night and sitting on the couch eating Oreos, but alas, the research doesn’t back me up on this.
And then there’s all the other things that help. You might be in therapy and actually getting the support you need (or maybe you’re a member of my One Love Collective community on Substack). You might have friends or family who really see you and hear you. You might be eating in a way that works for your body or spending real time on the things that light you up. You might love your job and get real fulfillment from it.
And some of it you didn’t build at all. Some people are born with a disposition that gives them more room, the same way some people are born needing more.
Why Doesn’t Anything Change, Even When Everybody Agrees It’s Unfair?
Incredibly, I’ve sat with couples who both agreed that things weren’t fair in their home, but over time nothing really changes.
Here’s why. There’s recent research showing that when you ask couples how they ended up like this, neither one of them remembers dividing anything up! Nobody sat down and said, you take all of it. What happened instead is that one person had a lighter week, or knew the pediatrician’s office better, or just got there first, over and over, for years. Each of those made sense at the time. And then one day it’s all yours, and nobody in the house can say exactly when or how that happened.
It works exactly the same way with your parents. You lived twenty minutes away when your dad had his first fall, so you went. You were the one who could take a Tuesday off, so you took the Tuesday. You met the cardiologist, so you’re the one who knows what he said. Now you’re running all of it, and your brother genuinely thinks the two of you are in this together, because from where he’s standing nobody ever decided anything.
And then we do the thing that makes it almost impossible to fix. We turn it into a personality! She’s just more organized than I am. I’m not a details person. He’s terrible with calendars, always has been. You’ve always been the responsible one in this family. You’re just the planner; that’s your thing.
Some of that might be true, but listen to what you just did. You took a job and called it a personality, and you can’t split up a personality. Nobody sits down and negotiates a fairer split of who’s naturally organized. So, the second it becomes who you are, it stops being something anybody has to do anything about, and that’s exactly why nothing changes long term.
And you do this to yourself too. I’m just a worrier. Same thing, except now there’s nobody to argue with you.
5 Ways to Share the Mental Load
Here are five things you can do to share the mental load.
1. Name the four parts out loud.
Anticipating, identifying options, deciding, and monitoring. Say them at the dinner table, say them to your brother on the phone, say them to yourself. I know that sounds simple, but this is where people get their aha moments. The issue is fish not knowing they’re wet, so you’ve got to break it down in a new language, in new terms, so people can see that they’re in the water.
2. Hand over a whole area, not a task.
Not, please take our son to the dentist. Instead, the dentist is yours now. That means you know when he’s due, you make the appointment, you deal with the insurance, you put it on the calendar, you take him, and you book the next one. If you hand over the task and keep the noticing, you didn’t hand over anything. You just gave yourself an employee to manage.
3. Stop using the word helping.
Say it out loud with whoever you share this with and stop saying it in your own head too. I mean it. Really watch your language; it matters. Somebody who’s helping is somebody who gets to stop when they’re done, and the person they’re helping is the one who owns the whole thing. So, catch it when you say your partner is so good, they help so much. Catch it when your brother says he’s happy to help with mom, or when your roommate says she’ll help clean up before people come over. All three of those are people describing a piece of their own life as a favor to you.
4. Let it get done badly.
If you are a fellow control enthusiast like myself, you really hate this one. If you hand over the dentist and then remind your partner, check on it, or ask whether it’s booked yet, you just took the monitoring back and it’s yours again. They will very likely do it worse than you would, especially in the beginning. Your kid will show up in the wrong shoes. Living with something, doing it at sixty to eighty percent, is way better than running it yourself forever, and you’re not going to believe me for about two months (maybe three).
5. Take things off the list instead of moving them around.
If you live alone, or you’re a single parent, or there’s just nobody standing there to take any of this, then everything above about sharing is useless to you, so your move is subtraction. What comes off completely? What can get automated, delivered, or set to repeat so you never think about it again? What are you not doing at all this year? Say no to the next thing you were about to say yes to and buy the birthday cake.
Therapy to Go Bundle
- Mental Load Inventory: Get clear on everything you’re carrying
- How it Became Your Job: A 30,000-Foot View of Your Mental Load
- How to Have the Handoff Conversation: What to say when you’re giving somebody a whole area
- The Subtraction Worksheet: Taking things off your list when there’s nobody to hand them to
- Journaling Prompts: What you believe about being the one who holds everything
- Assessing Your Bandwidth: What you’re working with before the day even starts
References
- Dean, L., Churchill, B., & Ruppanner, L. (2022). The mental load: building a deeper theoretical understanding of how cognitive and emotional labor overload women and mothers. Community, Work & Family, 25(1), 13-29.
- Daminger, A. (2019). The Cognitive Dimension of Household Labor. American Sociological Review, 84(4), 609-633.
- Ciciolla, L., & Luthar, S. S. (2019). Invisible Household Labor and Ramifications for Adjustment: Mothers as Captains of Households. Sex Roles, 81(7-8), 467-486.
- Berryman, C., Stanton, T. R., Bowering, K. J., Tabor, A., McFarlane, A., & Moseley, G. L. (2013). Evidence for working memory deficits in chronic pain: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Pain, 154(8), 1181-1196.
- Lim, J., & Dinges, D. F. (2010). A meta-analysis of the impact of short-term sleep deprivation on cognitive variables. Psychological Bulletin, 136(3), 375-389.
- Ludyga, S., Gerber, M., Pühse, U., Looser, V. N., & Kamijo, K. (2020). Systematic review and meta-analysis investigating moderators of long-term effects of exercise on cognition in healthy individuals. Nature Human Behaviour, 4(6), 603-612.
- Whitfield, T., Barnhofer, T., Acabchuk, R., Cohen, A., Lee, M., Schlosser, M., Arenaza-Urquijo, E. M., Boccia, M., Cañas-Martín, J., Cantou, P., Chetelat, G., Demnitz-King, H., Gonzalez-Perez, S., Klimecki, O., Marchant, N. L. (2022). The Effect of Mindfulness-based Programs on Cognitive Function in Adults: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Neuropsychology Review, 32(3), 677-702.
- Daminger, A. (2020). De-gendered Processes, Gendered Outcomes: How Egalitarian Couples Make Sense of Non-egalitarian Household Practices. American Sociological Review, 85(5), 806-829.
- Chai WJ, Abd Hamid AI and Abdullah JM (2018) Working Memory From the Psychological and Neurosciences Perspectives: A Review. Front. Psychol. 9:401. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00401
