I like to think of mental load in terms of a ‘mind bus’. It’s like a bus in my mind that travels through life with me and has a certain number of seats. Each aspect of my life takes up a seat, or sometimes more than one or even many seats. Sometimes it can feel like one of those buses you see in India with people hanging off the roof, sides and back as the seats are full. When I think about taking on anything else I try to think about whether my bus has any spare seats or whether something needs to get off first. No one wants to travel through life on an overcrowded bus…
“Mind Bus!!!” I LOVE this. It goes well with the “spoons” idea I learned from The Rest Room’s Natasha Lipman. One has only do many spoons to use in a day (energy/ability). Budget your spoons; use them considerately.
Just listened and loved this. Mental load and invisible labour is something I've spent a lot of time thinking and learning about. I must say I was surprised when Ben said he wasn't really aware of the concept. I guess it shows how different the conversations and the social media topics that are shown to men and women are because I feel like mental load is talked about everywhere at the moment. I've learnt a lot from following @thatdarnchat Laura Danger on Instagram. She is a "Fair Play" facilitator which is a program that teaches partners how to share their domestic labour fairly by breaking them down into tasks and someone taking responsibility for the entire task from start to finish, including all the invisible parts. I think sometimes it's easy to delegate one part like asking your partner to cook dinner but the invisible part is that you shopped which can take a lot of mental planning before and possibly meal planned and know what the kids will and won't eat and remembered what leftovers need eating up etc etc.
Or maybe one partner is there to pick up the kids from school quite often which is visible labour but the other parent enrolled the child in school, is the first point of contact with the school, organises the uniforms, school excursion payments, remembers to pack library books etc etc all that can go un-noticed by the parent who's not doing it if it's not brought to their attention.
I relate to this so much! When my son was younger, I had a really hard time communicating everything involved in my mental load without sounding like I was making a laundry list of complaints on my mental load that went unseen and unheard. I feel like I'm getting better at delegating and including my husband and son in sharing that mental load after years of practice and probably also just being at an age (almost 45) where I feel empowered to speak up!
Yes! So much of this is invisible, and it matters. My husband and I have been doing Fair Play for a little over a year, and it's changed our lives so much. The initial set-up was gruelling, but so worth it. We nowhave more time to enjoy together, and the enormous resentment I was carrying is (95%!) gone. The biggest challenge for me, mental load-wise, has been trying to separate my appearance/status as a woman and mother from whether things get done, and to what standard. I've internalised the idea that the state of our home/garden/kids' lunch boxes is an outward indicator of my personal value, and separating from that has been harder than I'd like.
I was a stay at home mom for a long time (completely my choice!) and took on a lot of the mental load while my husband completed his PhD and worked outside the home. I was keenly aware that I had almost everything to do with running the home and caring for our sons’ daily needs stored in my brain.
But I had an eye opening experience one day. We had been making pennies during my Dale’s grad school, and he had just begun his new post-graduation job. We were in our first home with three little boys and were essentially starting from scratch. I had gotten my oil changed and was pressured into getting some extra services, which added to the bill. When he saw the bill, Dale’s eyes filled with tears (really unusual for him!) and he said in momentary despair, “We’re never getting out of debt.” I realized then that he had a mental load all his own.
Life can be a lot, at different times and in different ways.
Brooke you are a brave woman releasing a podcast of you having this conversation with your partner! You were much more patient and accepting than I am in these discussions. But gosh, the fact that most men don’t even know what the mental load means really goes to the heart of the problem doesn’t it?
Also I had never really considered self development to be part of the mental load, that’s an interesting idea
This conversation reminded me of so many that I've had with my husband over the years. When my son was younger, these conversations were from a place of exhaustion and overwhelm. Now that my son is a teenager, I do my best to vocalize my own needs, my energy level and even include him in the process of what it takes to actually take care of this invisible labor load by both my husband and me. Sometimes that means including him in the process (and consideration beforehand!) of choosing a gift for a loved one, caring for someone who is grieving, planning a trip, making a financial purchase, etc. I also know that I add to my mental load because of my own anxiety to think of "all the things" so that no stone is left unturned. I have to check myself sometimes on that...and sometimes my husband and son help me do that as well!!
This episode really resonated with me. I’ve never commented but feel that the conversation between you and Ben hit very close to home. A few years ago a friend recommended the book Rushing Women’s Syndrome by Libby Weaver to me - I was feeling overwhelmed, tired and couldn’t understand why I couldn’t get ‘all of the things’ done. I still feel like that 😊, but reading and listening to other women talk about feeling the same way helps me to feel that I’m not alone. The invisible mental load is so real and so difficult to explain to my husband - so it was so interesting to Ben’s perspective, such an interesting conversation. I started listening to you both years ago with the Slow Home podcast and I’m loving The Tortoise, so much of what you’re writing and talking about is echoing how I’m feeling. ❤️
I have been trying to teach my husband about this. He is always like ‘remind me’ and I am now like - nope I am carrying enough! Thanks for this episode. I feel seen!
Thank you Brooke, I thoroughly enjoyed this episode and related to so much of what you raised. I think just the topic of “mental load” is one many, many households and workplaces could benefit from.
Really appreciate this episode, Brooke! Mental load is such an important topic and conversation; I always find it so helpful to hear other people's perspectives and experience of it. And, I agree that it is such a broad and nuanced topic; I would totally be interested in another episode on it one day if that is of interest to you and Ben :)
[Sorry to hear you are/were feeling under the weather -- hope you're able to rest and are feeling better soon!💚]
This was such a thought-provoking episode. Thanks for hashing it out between you, Brooke and Ben! Ben's attitude early on in the discussion, when he said 'why does it have to be a mental load? Why can't you just...do it?', really blindsided me, and I couldn't work out why, because it was a fair point. But it also seemed way too simplistic. So I went away and thought about it, and eventually I came to the conclusion that the mental load exists where one's circles of care and circles of responsibility overlap. If you care about something - perhaps it's part of your small, everyday values - and you feel it's your responsibility, then it adds itself to your mental load. But if either care or a feeling of responsibility is missing, then it becomes one of those things you just...do. For example, I'm responsible for the menu planning and grocery shopping in our house, and I care about my family's nutrition, so my mental load includes the shopping list and a weekly baking session to provide healthy snacks. However, I don't care about the beer or wine, so often I don't remember that. It's not part of my mental load. It *is* part of my husband's mental load, because he cares about whether he has a beer to have with Friday night dinner, and he feels responsible for checking if it's in the cabinet. Sometimes I don't feel responsible for things that are important, like the car insurance, and that's OK. It gets done when we get reminded but I don't carry the knowledge that it needs doing around with me. Similarly, because my husband works full time outside the home and my full time job is caring for and educating the children, he leaves the responsibility for planning our home ed activities to me, and that's OK too. This, then, led me to think about what you said, Brooke, about feeling undervalued, and whether that could be a response to being forced to either care or feel responsible for something that you don't actually care about or don't want to be responsible for? Which makes it more a boundary issue than a mental load one. Like I said: thought-provoking!
Very thought-provoking and I love this take on it. Many of the household chores are things that have to be done and are never-ending, like putting dinner on the table or doing laundry. But no one else is going to do them, so you're almost forced into doing them, which removes the 'value' and therefore the enjoyment! I guess you could relate some of these to a personal value, such as cooking dinner is done to provide a nutritious healthy cost-effective meal for your family, rather than spending lots of money on an unhealthy takeaway
Loved this episode, Brooke! I’ve thought a lot before about invisible or behind-the-scenes labors, but hadn’t used the words mental load before. Thanks for that language! It certainly does feel like a heavy load to remember certain tasks that must be done. My spouse and I split who does which chores and mine is laundry. I feel good about the chore distribution, and also laundry is such a looooong process, full of going up and down the stairs, remembering when to go switch it out, hauling things up to hang to dry, etc. It was a revelation to me to read KC Davis’s suggestion in “how to keep house while drowning” that it’s okay to NOT hang things up or folds things right away, and now clean laundry will take a week to get folded and it’s so NICE and freeing! As someone who has to count her spoons, sometimes things that feel small to remember or to complete are exhausting. Thanks again for this episode and thanks to the folks in the comments with your great reflections!
Thank you for this! It is a topic that needs discussion. After my little boy's birth, I didn't know how to explain mental load to my husband, because I was exhausted and I didn't have the vocabulary.
I felt so alone and overwhelmed. Now, almost 3 years later I'm reading Fair Play by Eve Rodsky and listening to you and I'm so relieved to realise that I'm not freaking crazy and I'm not alone.
I loved this episode and could relate to all of it. The mental load of family life is tough. I'm lucky to have a partner that does plenty of tasks around the house, and the kids at 10 are starting to do small tasks now. But the biggest part of the mental load is the planning and scheduling. I feel like it generally comes down to the 'mother' role to plan ahead for things like 'what's for dinner tonight' (to get food out of the freezer), taking kids to after school activities, buying presents for the birthday party at the weekend, ensuring there's enough food for kids lunches/recess. That is all the stuff that only I think and worry about. Although maybe my partner doesn't think about them because he knows I'll have it sorted!
I agree! did something similar with my art supplies and hobbies in general, and it made all the difference. I feel like I can focus on the core hobbies that I'm most passionate about (photography, writing, gardening, and reading), and I can just see the others as playful experiments! Understanding why I enjoy each hobby and what I hope to get out of it (escape, wonder, beauty, etc.) helps me to keep the stakes low as well!
I like to think of mental load in terms of a ‘mind bus’. It’s like a bus in my mind that travels through life with me and has a certain number of seats. Each aspect of my life takes up a seat, or sometimes more than one or even many seats. Sometimes it can feel like one of those buses you see in India with people hanging off the roof, sides and back as the seats are full. When I think about taking on anything else I try to think about whether my bus has any spare seats or whether something needs to get off first. No one wants to travel through life on an overcrowded bus…
“Mind Bus!!!” I LOVE this. It goes well with the “spoons” idea I learned from The Rest Room’s Natasha Lipman. One has only do many spoons to use in a day (energy/ability). Budget your spoons; use them considerately.
Omg I love this analogy. Fantastic. And so darn true.
Just listened and loved this. Mental load and invisible labour is something I've spent a lot of time thinking and learning about. I must say I was surprised when Ben said he wasn't really aware of the concept. I guess it shows how different the conversations and the social media topics that are shown to men and women are because I feel like mental load is talked about everywhere at the moment. I've learnt a lot from following @thatdarnchat Laura Danger on Instagram. She is a "Fair Play" facilitator which is a program that teaches partners how to share their domestic labour fairly by breaking them down into tasks and someone taking responsibility for the entire task from start to finish, including all the invisible parts. I think sometimes it's easy to delegate one part like asking your partner to cook dinner but the invisible part is that you shopped which can take a lot of mental planning before and possibly meal planned and know what the kids will and won't eat and remembered what leftovers need eating up etc etc.
Or maybe one partner is there to pick up the kids from school quite often which is visible labour but the other parent enrolled the child in school, is the first point of contact with the school, organises the uniforms, school excursion payments, remembers to pack library books etc etc all that can go un-noticed by the parent who's not doing it if it's not brought to their attention.
I relate to this so much! When my son was younger, I had a really hard time communicating everything involved in my mental load without sounding like I was making a laundry list of complaints on my mental load that went unseen and unheard. I feel like I'm getting better at delegating and including my husband and son in sharing that mental load after years of practice and probably also just being at an age (almost 45) where I feel empowered to speak up!
Yes! So much of this is invisible, and it matters. My husband and I have been doing Fair Play for a little over a year, and it's changed our lives so much. The initial set-up was gruelling, but so worth it. We nowhave more time to enjoy together, and the enormous resentment I was carrying is (95%!) gone. The biggest challenge for me, mental load-wise, has been trying to separate my appearance/status as a woman and mother from whether things get done, and to what standard. I've internalised the idea that the state of our home/garden/kids' lunch boxes is an outward indicator of my personal value, and separating from that has been harder than I'd like.
I was a stay at home mom for a long time (completely my choice!) and took on a lot of the mental load while my husband completed his PhD and worked outside the home. I was keenly aware that I had almost everything to do with running the home and caring for our sons’ daily needs stored in my brain.
But I had an eye opening experience one day. We had been making pennies during my Dale’s grad school, and he had just begun his new post-graduation job. We were in our first home with three little boys and were essentially starting from scratch. I had gotten my oil changed and was pressured into getting some extra services, which added to the bill. When he saw the bill, Dale’s eyes filled with tears (really unusual for him!) and he said in momentary despair, “We’re never getting out of debt.” I realized then that he had a mental load all his own.
Life can be a lot, at different times and in different ways.
Brooke you are a brave woman releasing a podcast of you having this conversation with your partner! You were much more patient and accepting than I am in these discussions. But gosh, the fact that most men don’t even know what the mental load means really goes to the heart of the problem doesn’t it?
Also I had never really considered self development to be part of the mental load, that’s an interesting idea
This conversation reminded me of so many that I've had with my husband over the years. When my son was younger, these conversations were from a place of exhaustion and overwhelm. Now that my son is a teenager, I do my best to vocalize my own needs, my energy level and even include him in the process of what it takes to actually take care of this invisible labor load by both my husband and me. Sometimes that means including him in the process (and consideration beforehand!) of choosing a gift for a loved one, caring for someone who is grieving, planning a trip, making a financial purchase, etc. I also know that I add to my mental load because of my own anxiety to think of "all the things" so that no stone is left unturned. I have to check myself sometimes on that...and sometimes my husband and son help me do that as well!!
This episode really resonated with me. I’ve never commented but feel that the conversation between you and Ben hit very close to home. A few years ago a friend recommended the book Rushing Women’s Syndrome by Libby Weaver to me - I was feeling overwhelmed, tired and couldn’t understand why I couldn’t get ‘all of the things’ done. I still feel like that 😊, but reading and listening to other women talk about feeling the same way helps me to feel that I’m not alone. The invisible mental load is so real and so difficult to explain to my husband - so it was so interesting to Ben’s perspective, such an interesting conversation. I started listening to you both years ago with the Slow Home podcast and I’m loving The Tortoise, so much of what you’re writing and talking about is echoing how I’m feeling. ❤️
I have been trying to teach my husband about this. He is always like ‘remind me’ and I am now like - nope I am carrying enough! Thanks for this episode. I feel seen!
Thank you Brooke, I thoroughly enjoyed this episode and related to so much of what you raised. I think just the topic of “mental load” is one many, many households and workplaces could benefit from.
Really appreciate this episode, Brooke! Mental load is such an important topic and conversation; I always find it so helpful to hear other people's perspectives and experience of it. And, I agree that it is such a broad and nuanced topic; I would totally be interested in another episode on it one day if that is of interest to you and Ben :)
[Sorry to hear you are/were feeling under the weather -- hope you're able to rest and are feeling better soon!💚]
This was such a thought-provoking episode. Thanks for hashing it out between you, Brooke and Ben! Ben's attitude early on in the discussion, when he said 'why does it have to be a mental load? Why can't you just...do it?', really blindsided me, and I couldn't work out why, because it was a fair point. But it also seemed way too simplistic. So I went away and thought about it, and eventually I came to the conclusion that the mental load exists where one's circles of care and circles of responsibility overlap. If you care about something - perhaps it's part of your small, everyday values - and you feel it's your responsibility, then it adds itself to your mental load. But if either care or a feeling of responsibility is missing, then it becomes one of those things you just...do. For example, I'm responsible for the menu planning and grocery shopping in our house, and I care about my family's nutrition, so my mental load includes the shopping list and a weekly baking session to provide healthy snacks. However, I don't care about the beer or wine, so often I don't remember that. It's not part of my mental load. It *is* part of my husband's mental load, because he cares about whether he has a beer to have with Friday night dinner, and he feels responsible for checking if it's in the cabinet. Sometimes I don't feel responsible for things that are important, like the car insurance, and that's OK. It gets done when we get reminded but I don't carry the knowledge that it needs doing around with me. Similarly, because my husband works full time outside the home and my full time job is caring for and educating the children, he leaves the responsibility for planning our home ed activities to me, and that's OK too. This, then, led me to think about what you said, Brooke, about feeling undervalued, and whether that could be a response to being forced to either care or feel responsible for something that you don't actually care about or don't want to be responsible for? Which makes it more a boundary issue than a mental load one. Like I said: thought-provoking!
Very thought-provoking and I love this take on it. Many of the household chores are things that have to be done and are never-ending, like putting dinner on the table or doing laundry. But no one else is going to do them, so you're almost forced into doing them, which removes the 'value' and therefore the enjoyment! I guess you could relate some of these to a personal value, such as cooking dinner is done to provide a nutritious healthy cost-effective meal for your family, rather than spending lots of money on an unhealthy takeaway
Loved this episode, Brooke! I’ve thought a lot before about invisible or behind-the-scenes labors, but hadn’t used the words mental load before. Thanks for that language! It certainly does feel like a heavy load to remember certain tasks that must be done. My spouse and I split who does which chores and mine is laundry. I feel good about the chore distribution, and also laundry is such a looooong process, full of going up and down the stairs, remembering when to go switch it out, hauling things up to hang to dry, etc. It was a revelation to me to read KC Davis’s suggestion in “how to keep house while drowning” that it’s okay to NOT hang things up or folds things right away, and now clean laundry will take a week to get folded and it’s so NICE and freeing! As someone who has to count her spoons, sometimes things that feel small to remember or to complete are exhausting. Thanks again for this episode and thanks to the folks in the comments with your great reflections!
Thank you for this! It is a topic that needs discussion. After my little boy's birth, I didn't know how to explain mental load to my husband, because I was exhausted and I didn't have the vocabulary.
I felt so alone and overwhelmed. Now, almost 3 years later I'm reading Fair Play by Eve Rodsky and listening to you and I'm so relieved to realise that I'm not freaking crazy and I'm not alone.
Thank you!
I loved this episode and could relate to all of it. The mental load of family life is tough. I'm lucky to have a partner that does plenty of tasks around the house, and the kids at 10 are starting to do small tasks now. But the biggest part of the mental load is the planning and scheduling. I feel like it generally comes down to the 'mother' role to plan ahead for things like 'what's for dinner tonight' (to get food out of the freezer), taking kids to after school activities, buying presents for the birthday party at the weekend, ensuring there's enough food for kids lunches/recess. That is all the stuff that only I think and worry about. Although maybe my partner doesn't think about them because he knows I'll have it sorted!
I agree! did something similar with my art supplies and hobbies in general, and it made all the difference. I feel like I can focus on the core hobbies that I'm most passionate about (photography, writing, gardening, and reading), and I can just see the others as playful experiments! Understanding why I enjoy each hobby and what I hope to get out of it (escape, wonder, beauty, etc.) helps me to keep the stakes low as well!