Our mental load has an impact on our wellbeing.
It may not be immediately obvious, but that doesn’t mean it’s not exhausting or that it can’t impact your physical, mental, and emotional wellness.
As we move into the fourth month of the year, it’s a good time to check in, examine our mental load and how we can do things differently.
Research has found a majority of the mental load (or cognitive labour) regularly falls with women.
Every relationship is different, and the balance of the mental load may be different in each household.
As we look at how the mental load impacts the wellbeing of women, the concepts for alleviating the mental load can applied to any household.
Mental load is defined as:
“… the cognitive effort involved in managing your work, relationships, a family, and a household. Mental load is the whole bundle of details you manage throughout the day. It has to do with your responsibilities, formal or not, as well as the decisions you have to make.”
(Source: BetterUp)
A good example for understanding this is cooking dinner for a group of people.
The mental load is the planning and organisation that goes into making it happen:
Often, the actual cooking of the meal takes less time than the preparation.
For many households, the burden of mental load is often invisible, and difficult to quantify.
Part of the challenge is that it’s not just one job or one thing at a time, it’s a constant juggling act.
In family situations when children are involved, there can be more to remember and more things to feel responsible for, such as:
The mental load also includes things like managing health, holidays, and family celebrations.
Even in smaller households this is still challenging.
When the mental load is unbalanced, it can leave many of us feeling exhausted and frustrated.
One of the challenges of the mental load is the expectation that one person needs to ask for help to receive it.
Whereas when the mental load is truly shared between the two parties, this isn’t required because both people in the relationship or household take responsibility for what needs to be done.
Households can go through phases of managing responsibilities.
However, it is helpful to acknowledge that when and if the balance tips too far to one person, it can cause issues.
If you need to share some of the mental labour or you’re the one being approached, there are ways to constructively approach the conversation.
Here are a few tips for both parties to help get the balance back:
How to support someone’s mental load