Episode 106: The Mental Load: Why Your Brain Won't Turn Off at Night
ITUNES | SPOTIFY
You've heard the term "mental load". You've seen it in funny memes on social media. But in this episode, we go beyond the definition and get into what the mental load is actually costing you: your cognitive bandwidth, your patience, and your presence at the dinner table. You'll hear why carrying the mental load isn't proof that you care more or that you're more capable; it's proof that your system is unbalanced. And systems can be redesigned. Plus, you'll walk away with one concrete place to start: a 10-minute brain dump exercise that makes the invisible visible to you, and to the people in your home who need to see it too.
This is the work I do with my clients, using the Fair Play method. If you're ready to make changes and share more of the mental load, I have three 1:1 coaching spots opening in May and June. Click here to answer a few questions to see if you'd be a good fit. www.themothernurture.com/application.
Links and resources mentioned in this episode:
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You are listening to the Life Coach for Working Moms podcast, the show where we are talking about what it actually takes to make life work as a working mom. I'm your host, Katelyn Denning, a full time working mom of three and a certified life and executive coach. I'm so glad you're here and I hope you enjoy this week's episode. Hello. Hello. Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. I'm so excited to be here with you again. This week we are talking about the mental load. I did a poll recently in a talk that I gave to a company, which. Did you know that I do that? If you have an organization or company that wants to hear and explore and think about the mental load, invisible labor and how that shows up in the workplace, please reach out to me. I love this topic, but I ask the audience in that talk, how many of them were familiar with the term mental load? Other terms that play in the similar space are cognitive load, emotional labor. Not quite the same thing, but definitely in the same arena. Invisible work. And there were a quite a few hands, I would say the majority of people were familiar with or had heard of those terms. Which I think is a great thing because I'm not sure, and you can challenge me on this, but I am not sure that that same percentage of hands would've gone up maybe a decade ago, maybe even just five years ago. And to me, that is encouraging because it means that we are having conversations about these topics, and when you are having conversations, that means you know what it is. You can name what you're experiencing. And that is always the first step toward resolution or problem solving or coming up with ideas to make it better. So I am going to assume that for all of you listening here, you have found and followed along with the Life Coach for Working Moms podcast. You are probably familiar with this term. You've done your own research when you are Googling, why am I so overwhelmed? Or my brain is always thinking and strategizing about the next thing that I have to do. I'm sure those search results have come up with something related to the mental load. And so I wanna do, , an episode dedicated to this topic in particular to make sure, or remind those of you who are familiar with it, what it is, what you're looking for, what it costs you, and what you can start to do about it. I don't have all of the answers, but this is a question, a challenge that I navigate with my clients every single day, every single coaching session, and I have some ideas, so I wanna share those with you here. But also just see this as a conversation starter. I think the mental load is probably best described through story, through experience, and so if I were to , sum it up and paint that picture for you, I would tell you that the clock on the oven in your kitchen reads probably 9:00 PM at night. You've gotten everyone to bed. You've given the last drink of water, the last trip to the bathroom, the last hug. You sit down, you crash on the couch, you crash in bed, or you just finally sit down, maybe at the kitchen island, maybe at your table. Finally, and while you are turning on. Netflix or Apple TV or picking up your phone, anything to start to decompress and distract yourself from the day that you just had instead of resting, your brain starts turning. That mental ticker starts to run across the bottom of the screen with everything. You have yet to do or that you need to do? I should get the milk ready for daycare tomorrow. Oh, shoot. Did I put toilet paper on the list for the next time we place an order at the store? Because pretty sure we just put the last roll on in the bathroom. There's a permission slip on the counter. I should probably get up and go fill that out. I got a voicemail today from the orthodontist. It's time for me to get that next appointment on the calendar. Or what about that email? Or, oh, let me quickly look up what to do about sibling arguments. I, I don't know how to handle these. It is that constant loop of not just the tasks, but the anticipating of the tasks. I'm sure that sounds familiar. That is not you being anxious. That's not you being a control freak. That is the mental load. And so I wanna talk about what it actually is, why it is quietly exhausting you and what you can do about it. So again, the mental load isn't just the execution of the test. We've talked before here on the podcast about how that is actually oftentimes the easiest part. The easiest part is to add toilet paper to cart, put a new bag into the trash can, washing the dishes. The invisible cognitive work of managing the household is so much more. It is tracking. It is anticipating, it is remembering, it is planning, it is delegating, and then it is following up. To see that the thing either got done or what the outcome was, if there are any additional tasks that need to be done as a result of the outcome, just today I got a reminder email about scheduling orthodontist appointments and I replied to it. And then she replied with a date and time that she'd scheduled me for. But of course, that didn't actually work for me. So now it's another thing on my list. I need to follow up or I need to just call it's the difference between taking out the trash for your trash pickup day and knowing. That trash is getting picked up tomorrow that you're almost out of bags, and that next week is when the yard waste gets picked up. I've heard some people refer to the mental load as the management job that no one officially assigned to you. You didn't apply for it, it just became yours by default. You were the person that noticed, and I think it's important , to notice and to call out the mental load. Managing the mental load isn't proof that you care more. Or that you are more capable of doing those things. It's proof that our system is unbalanced, and the good news is, a system can be redesigned. That doesn't mean it's easy. That doesn't mean it will happen quickly, but it is possible. I definitely stepped into this default role , when my husband and I first became parents, and we were both managing our careers and our household, and I will never forget. Somewhere in those early years, I wish I could tell you when, but they are very hazy. I was very, very tired. It may have been somewhere in , my first child's toddler years, or maybe after my second child was born and I was having a true anxious moment. I felt crippled. Paralyzed by all of the things I was holding. It was like , my head could no longer sit on my shoulders. It weighed so much. I had to put it down. And my husband asked me to, in a very helpful way to email him, to send him an email of all of the things that were on my mind so he could take some things off my plate. And it was eyeopening for both of us. I saw how much I was holding, not just the tasks I put, all of the things I was thinking about. What is coming next? Do we want to do X or do we want to do Y and what are we gonna do about this? So much of the mental load is often questions even. And so I saw the list and realized how much I was holding, and he saw the list and realized. How much there was that he wasn't even aware of, and that was the initial invitation, conversation starter, call it whatever you will. For us, we didn't know fair play at the time. Now I use those tools with my clients. I am a fair play facilitator, but it starts somewhere. There is a moment where you have that reckoning and realize all that you are holding. And that mental load is costly. It's very costly. I think most of the costs can be distilled into three buckets. The first is, of course, cognitive bandwidth. So every item that you are tracking takes up additional space. If you think about your phone or your laptop, there is only so much space. Before you start getting those notifications, like you're almost out of storage space, or you start to realize that your battery is getting drained way faster than it did before, or you cannot save any other files on your device. The same happens with our bandwidth. It is why we feel tired. It is why you feel tired when you haven't done that much physically. You sat at your desk or you walked to and from the car, and you're thinking, why am I so exhausted? It's because of all of the things that you are holding, that you are thinking about, that your brain is revisiting so that you don't forget that ticker is the perfect description of what it is, like that ticker across the news station that you watch. It's kind of annoying, honestly. I mean, I know they wanna give us the weather updates or the top news stories that are happening, but if you think about how hard it can be to watch whatever program you're trying to watch, while that is also running across the top of the screen, it's distracting. The same thing happens to us with our mental load lists. So it costs you in cognitive bandwidth. It costs you in resentment. , that builds slowly and often. Invisibly. You're not mad about the one thing. I mean you are, but it's often out of blown, out of proportion. Because you're exhausted from carrying a thousand things. It's not fair. Why am I the only one who notices and thinks about these things? And so we start to present those around us, our partners, the friends who seem like they have it easier or they have more help or. It shows up in all of these ways, but resentment , is exhausting. It's a very valid feeling, but it takes energy to hold that resentment. It does not feel good. So there's a cost there , for us and for those that we resent. And the third cost is that it costs us our presence. Just like saying that ticker is distracting and exhausting when your mind is running through the household list at dinner time, you're not actually at dinner thinking and noticing the food that you're eating. This is a side note, but I recently have gone through some work with , a GI. Expert and one of my major ahas, which sounds so simple, but actually makes so much sense. And I wonder if you notice this about yourself too. I just wasn't chewing my food. When they talked about how many times you should chew your food and the consistency that it should be, before you were swallowing, I thought, oh my gosh. I might say, oh, this dinner is delicious, but I am thinking about all of the things that I have to do next. I know that I eat way too quickly. And so that's just one example of where. The mental load takes me away, not just from being present and focused and in tune with what and how I'm eating, but with my family who's at the table with me as we talk about our days. Just enjoying those everyday moments and instead you're thinking about all of the things that you're responsible for, that you need to take care of. I cannot tell you the number of clients I have coached over the years that come to me with a goal of creating more energy for themselves. Now, certainly there are a. Things that we look at in terms of how they're spending their time and what does movement look like and sleep , and some of the basics of just caring for ourselves to see if there's anything we can do to adjust their baseline for energy. But so often the lack of energy, the feeling of exhaustion comes from this very thing . And I had one client in particular who felt like she was working so much. She was like, I need to work less because I'm so tired by the time I get done with my workday that I don't give my best to my daughter. And then I'm logging back on at night and working again. Some days, and I'm just exhausted. I just work too much. So my goal is actually to reduce the hours that I spend to be more effective, more productive during my workday, so I can work less well. When she did her time tracking, which is something that I have clients do, when we first start working together, we noticed that actually what she thought she was working in terms of number of hours was more than what she was actually working when we clocked the hours that she was at her desk or even on her phone, replying to emails, working on presentations, responding to teams, messages from her team, which spanned a couple of different time zones. So I, I certainly would've expected higher numbers just due to that alone. But her work hours were not as high as what she thought they were. And as we started to dig deeper into that data, what I realized was that her brain never turned off if she wasn't thinking about what was next at work. She was thinking about what was next at home and what was next in her parenting journey and what she needed to do to maintain her relationship and her health and to manage the people on her team. And so. In a way, she was working those high number of hours, but the work maybe looked like sitting on the couch while her mind was running or taking a walk to get those steps in, but thinking about her to-do list. And so it's no wonder she was exhausted, her brain never got a break, wasn't able to step away from the thoughts about the mental load. It's like having two full-time jobs. One that is invisible. Now, I know we talked about this being proof that the system is unbalanced and systems can be redesigned. But today in this podcast episode that I try to keep short so you can listen to them within the time that you have. We are not gonna be able to fix the entire system today, but I do believe you can start. And the first thing that I want you to do is to set a timer for 10 minutes max. You could probably do this in five to eight minutes actually. So I want you to set a timer. I want you to open up. A word doc, a notebook page, , a physical paper notebook, maybe even an email like I did back in the day that you ultimately want to send. And I want you to start with that brain dump. I want you to write down or type everything that you are currently tracking, managing, or remembering for your household. For your family, for yourself, and for your work. The mental load exists in the workplace as well. This is not just a home issue. I want you to include the things that feel maybe too small to actually count out following up on that text message that someone sent you two days ago that you didn't respond in the moment, and now it's been lost to the bottom of the big long list of text messages. The fact that you maybe are low on dish soap. The questions that you have, , again, the following up, the looking at what the outcome of that task was, I want you to get it all as much as you can out of your head. This is not a to-do list. This is a visibility exercise. I want you to have that moment where you see all of the things right now that you are thinking about and in general, what and how much you hold. Then when you're finished, I invite you, if you're open to it, if you do have a partner or a co-parent or someone who is in a position to help manage some of these items, ask yourself, does my partner know all of this exists? Does my partner know that all of this exists? So when I start this work with any of my clients, our first goal isn't to hand it all off or to even take that list and divide it in two or whatever your situation looks like, and pass as much off as we can. The goal is to start with visibility. Making the invisible visible to ourselves and then to those around us who deserve and who we know, and who we want to know that this is what we're holding. You can't have a conversation about balance when one person can't see what balance would even require. So as I shared before, my initial list was an email and my partner had invited that, so I recognized that, he set me up very nicely to share all of that. If your partner doesn't know or hasn't seen or even thought about the fact that you are carrying so much of the mental load. You are gonna have some additional steps in your process to invite them into a conversation in a way that feels very curious and exploratory and experimental. Maybe it looks like putting the list somewhere visible, like on your counter or on your fridge. Maybe it looks like sharing openly about how you are feeling and asking if they would be open to taking a look at the list together. When I work with clients to begin the process of sharing responsibilities, I have scripts and templates that you can use to invite that conversation. And then we typically start with 1, 2, 3. Regular type of everyday responsibility. That includes the anticipation and the follow up components to it. And we use those as a test case and we invite the partner into a conversation starting with just packing for travel or trash or dishwasher or the weekly meal plan. It really doesn't matter which task you start with. It is starting somewhere to test out this collaborative approach, and it all begins with starting to make that invisible mental load visible to you both to see how much you're holding and to share that and make it visible to others in your household or others on your team. So start with that short timer, a quick download of all of the things that you are holding, and if you are feeling brave and ready. Share that list, invite into a conversation or make it visible, whatever feels doable for you as a next step. And this is definitely part of a bigger conversation that you and we here on the podcast will continue to have about sharing the load about what fair play actually looks like in real life, , and so much more If this episode resonates with you and you want that support to actually walk through this, not just understanding what the mental load is, what invisible labor looks like, but actually changing how much you hold and how you share those responsibilities. I have three, one-on-one coaching spots open starting in May and June. If you want to learn more, I would. Invite you to fill out a quick coaching application. I say application. It's just a few questions for you to tell me a little bit about you and I will let you know whether or not I think this could be a good fit for what you are looking for. So you can find the link to those questions at themothernurture.com/application. I'll also have all of this information in the show notes at themothernurture.com/podcast. All right. I can't wait to talk to you in the next episode. Until then, I hope you take care, talk soon. Thank you for listening and as always, for being a part of this working mom community. You can find everything related to this episode in the show notes at themothernurture.com/podcast, you can also find information about how I support working moms just like you through one-on-one, and group coaching, as well as access a number of resources and articles all on my website at themothernurture.com. I will see you again next week for another episode of the podcast.
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