The Mental Load is More Than a To-Do List
As a researcher who studies the mental load and travels the world talking about it with the public, I’ve been surprised to see how quickly it’s caught on. A mom in Dallas recognized it in the constant emotional thinking work she does to make sure all of her children’s permission forms are filled out and turned in on time. Another in Boston saw it in the constant energy required to make sure none of the treats her son indulged in carried traces of nuts. And, a caretaker in Pert, Australia recognized it in his constant monitoring of his aging mother’s daily activities while in assisted living.
We often think of the mental load of all the thinking work that parents do. But the mental load is so much more – it is the emotional thinking work we all do day-in and day-out to make sure our families are happy, our colleagues are being treated well, our employees are working in safe environments and we are prepared for whatever disaster big or small comes next.
The Mental Load is Emotional Thinking
In a 2021 article on the mental load I wrote with Sociologists Liz Dean and Brendan Churchill, we were trying to better conceptualize how the mental load was distinct from other types of labor – housework and childcare – and from other types of experiences – burn-out and exhaustion. We were also interested in whether the mental load was just list making, the scheduling, calendaring and to-do list making of everyday life, or emotion work, the listening to, caring about and monitoring of everyday life. What we decided was it was both – the mental load becomes a load because it is the combination of thinking and emotional work.
This means the mental load is different from, say, clerical or administrative work. At work, you might be in charge of calendaring for your team. You have to think, plan and execute, which can be stressful. But rarely does this task come with significant emotional attachment or stakes, unless of course things go wrong. But keeping a calendar for your family is full of emotional landmines—are the kids spending too much time in structured extracurriculars and not getting enough restful time? Are you and your spouse slaying it at work but never getting date night? Are your kids on their screens too much or is this modern form of play-dates? Now, that’s not just thinking. It’s emotional thinking. And, these mental loads can be sticky and heavy, weighing down the person doing this labor.
The Mental Load Cannot Be Easily Handed Off to Others
This deeper definition of the mental load raises the bar for potential solutions. If the mental load were so simple as keeping track of who is where and whether the milk in the fridge had gone bad, then we could use google calendars or a productivity app to keep track of it. And, when the work was done – hiring a babysitter for a night out or organizing camp for a summer holiday – then the stress of the work would disappear. But sometimes, it doesn’t. Many women may allocate these tasks only to still be filled with dread, stress and guilt.
Why? Well, we proposed this was because the mental load is tied to the love of others, and so even when we outsource the work, the worry about whether people are happy at first days of school, or whether the children eating that Happy Meal for dinner will ruin their health forever, never subside.
What’s more, the mental load, unlike other forms of domestic labor, like cooking, cleaning and laundry, or other clerical work like calendaring for your team, can be carried everywhere, because it can be done internally, and it isn’t bound by space. You don’t bring your dirty dishes or laundry to work but you carry that mental load all over the place – to work, into the bath, on your long relaxing walks, and into your sleep. And, wow, is it disruptive!
The Mental Load is Perpetual and Ubiquitous
And because the emotions involved in the mental load often go to the core of who we are and what we value most, it’s work that never really ends. Alison Daminger identifies the mental load as having four pieces – anticipating problems, identifying solutions, deciding outcomes and monitoring all of the above. We can think about this like cycle: the minute you finish emotional thinking work for one problem, you are ready to anticipate another. And, so the cycle starts again and never ends. The mental load is enduring.
Of course, parents do a HUGE mental load and it is exhausting. But, we can think about mental loads sitting across other domains too.
We do emotional thinking work in our work lives, around personal care, and around our communities and family members beyond our children. At work, we often do some emotional thinking work about the tone and tenor emails we may have sent, or whether our team is coping well with remote work or their own family demands. In personal care, the COVID-19 pandemic created an incredible amount of emotional thinking work about whether we should attend family events, send children to school or visit grandparents on the weekends. We often carry mental loads within communities about our safety – where are well-lit roads to walk home at night on? – our environment – do we have a clear plan for the next hurricane? – and about our social lives – is my elderly neighbor okay in the snow storm?
Can We Make the Mental Load Lighter?
When we think about the mental load beyond the nuclear family, and beyond a set of tasks, we can start to see that loads build onto other loads. Some of us are carrying far heavier loads than others. The consequences of carrying the mental load are significant – fragmenting our concentration, our mental health and our sleep. And, it helps us to understand why some of us are more exhausted and burnt-out than others. The mental load is heavy and researchers like myself and a bevvy of others are working hard to understand its dimensions, as well as to develop an evidenced-based approached to lightening up.
Once we can see that the mental load is not just list-making, that the mental load is emotional thinking work that sits across all domains of our lives, we can start to lighten the load.