The Mental Load

“Out of all the food you prepare, I think I love your everyday cooking the most'', she says as we get ready to have the roasted chicken that I have been preparing for as long as she and her brother can remember. She is my daughter, Laura, and the exchange we recently had in our kitchen left me reflecting on a couple of things after she had gone back to her own place in NYC.


These days, I am an empty nester, and you may think that I found it upsetting that, out of my many attempts at more advanced dishes over the years, in the end, it was the chicken that turned out to be the winner. Or that I am bemoaning the fact that I no longer cook for a bunch of people most days during the week. However, this is not the case. I happen to be a big fan of the chicken dish myself, and I actually enjoy the flexibility that my life offers me these days.  

What made me think was her point about the everyday aspect of life and how it aligns with my personal values. As mundane as it may sound, I love everyday life and all the regularity that comes with it. Like most, I truly appreciate new experiences and special occasions. But it is my everyday life that provides the fundamental structure and soundboard of my being in this life.

When I find myself out of balance it can often be traced back to some kind of uprooting or changes to my daily routines. But the sense of imbalance can also show when I am away from home for longer periods of time or when I have let myself get too far away from the daily practices that otherwise allow me to stay connected to myself.

The reasons we go through periods of imbalance are many and a natural part of life. Personal development happens when we step out of our comfort zone and face new challenges. Life can be overwhelming and doesn't always allow us to process in the way we would hope or transpire in the way we imagined our journey to be. What applies to all of us is the fact that disruption is an integrated aspect of all evolutionary processes. What sets us apart is the way we choose to respond to them.  

What I am learning from my life, and the lives of the many people I work with, is that imbalance is often tied to the way I manage expectations and how I prioritize my actions and priorities. Or rather, it is what happens when I am unable to calibrate other peoples’ demands against my own personal needs, or when I get distracted from what matters the most. 

Trying to understand some of the underlying dynamics of this distraction, I find the concept of the so-called ''mental load'' interesting. ''Mental load'' is the cognitive and emotional effort that goes into your work, your relationships with other people (including those you love), the household you run, or the communities you take part in. Different from the practical load, mental load has less to do with the physical task itself and more to do with the way you oversee and go about them. It is therefore sometimes also referred to as “worry work”.

Unlike physical work, mental load is typically invisible, intangible, and often unnoticed and underappreciated. When my kids were younger a typical example of my mental load would be things like remembering when it was time for new vaccinations, when it was our turn to carpool the soccer team, remembering to bring snacks, or to get a present for someone’s birthday party. And to this very day, I am still the one everyone turns to when they can’t find something and the one in charge of getting the house ready for holidays and trying to make sure everyone is having a good time.

The problem with this kind of mental load is not its value but its volume. When your mental to-do list either gets too long or filled with too much stuff occupying your mind, it easily impacts your ability to prioritize and can skew your perception of what is really important. At times when my own mental load is too heavy, I find that the more things I try to manage, the more inflated the importance of each ''to-do'' becomes, and I find myself struggling with creating a hierarchy of importance as well as connecting with what is relevant, worthwhile and of value to me.

When overwhelmed by my worry work, I try to “reign in” some of the overloads by:

  1. Visualizing it: Since the mental load primarily exists in my mind, I find it helpful to make it visible by i.e. writing it down or otherwise illustrating it to myself

  2. Prioritizing it: In order to reduce it, I work on deciding what is important and what can perhaps wait or be delegated to someone else. 

  3. Organizing it: To help structure the changes I want to make, I sometimes create a type of system that can help direct my focus and attention.

To give you a recent everyday example, I have created a simple system of two lists in the notes on my phone. One is called “The Never Ending List” and is the long list of things that I either have to get done or things I would like to do at some point. The other I have named “Today’s Five,” which is a shortlist of the things I decide to prioritize on the same day. Where the first list helps me capture what is otherwise just spinning around in my head, the second list helps me become aware of what has priority on the given day and what adds value to my life.

With the vacation season coming up for many, this is often an opportune time to reflect on some of the changes you would perhaps like to make to ensure that what takes up the most ''mental real estate'' also reflects what matters the most, to you. For some, this means time to consider a shift in their career, improvement of their personal wellness, or something else. For me, it will be a matter of revisiting the overall intentions I have set for myself at the beginning of the year and how to strengthen these in my day-to-day priorities and actions.  

No matter how and where you are going to spend your summer, I am wishing you all the very best.

With Love,

Sille

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