The Mental Load: Same Household, Two Different Perspectives

This week I have been drowning in the mental load I am carrying. What makes it slightly ironic is that I not only know the tools for managing it, I have written about them. I will admit, I feel slightly hypocritical. But should I?

I became curious rather than defeated. That curiosity led me to some interesting research.

I came across a systematic literature review by Reich-Stiebert, Froehlich and Voltmer (2023), published in the journal Sex Roles, which reviewed 31 peer-reviewed studies on what researchers call "mental labor," the cognitive dimension of unpaid household and childcare work. Not the doing, but the thinking, planning, organising, anticipating and monitoring that happens alongside it, and largely goes unseen.

Their key findings:

Women perform the greater share of mental labor, particularly around childcare and parenting decisions, and experience more negative consequences as a result, including stress, lower life and relationship satisfaction, and a negative impact on their careers.

Mental labor has five core elements: cognition, management, communal orientation, anticipation and invisibility. That last one is particularly telling. It often goes unnoticed, not just by others, but sometimes by the person performing it themselves.

And perhaps most striking: men often reported sharing mental labor equally with their partners. Women reported doing it themselves. The same household, two completely different perceptions.

Reading the last finding, an observation on how we do it in our home popped straight into my head.

Every week I make a meal plan. I know there will be tweaks, but at least there is enough food in the house. Each morning I think about whether anything needs to be prepared or taken out of the freezer. If prep is required, I try to fit it in during the day so that dinner is ready in time to get my son to bed at a reasonable hour.

My husband, when he is in charge of dinner, will not give it a second thought until roughly an hour before. Then he will have a look at what he can throw together. And if there is nothing? Pizza night. 😊

If he genuinely does not think about dinner until an hour before, he is not experiencing the mental load of it at all. This perception gap is not about bad intent. If you are not the one carrying the load, it can be genuinely hard to see it.

My conclusion: my mind is more at peace knowing that research backs that I am not the only one who sometimes feels the pile wins. And it reminded me that knowing something and living it are two very different things.

So, I go back to what I know and keep practising because as we know practice makes perfect 😊