What Is the Mental Load?

People write to me asking for a definition. Usually it's because they've been trying to explain the term to a partner and the conversation went badly. So here is the plainest version I can give, with the research behind it.

The short definition

The mental load is the thinking work of running a household. Not the doing of tasks, but everything around them: noticing that something needs to happen, working out the options, deciding, making sure someone does it, and checking that it got done.

The washing is a task. Knowing that the school uniform needs washing by Monday, that the good detergent is running out, and that the white shirt can't go in with the red one is the mental load.

The phrase spread widely after a French cartoonist called Emma published a comic in 2017, You Should Have Asked, about a man who would gladly help if only he'd been told. Researchers had been studying the same thing for years under other names, including cognitive labour and mental labour.

What the research breaks it into

The clearest model I know comes from the sociologist Allison Daminger, who published an interview study of 35 couples in the American Sociological Review in 2019. She divided the thinking work into four stages.

Anticipating is seeing a need before it arrives. Identifying options is working out what could be done. Deciding is choosing. Monitoring is checking that it happened and that it worked.

Women did more of this work overall in her study, and the gap was largest in anticipating and monitoring, the two stages that are hardest to see. Deciding was more often shared. It's a small qualitative study, so it describes patterns rather than how common they are. But the four stages give couples a vocabulary they usually don't have.

Why it matters for wellbeing

Two other studies show what carrying the load can cost. Shira Offer, writing in 2014, found that among middle-class dual-earner parents, thinking about family matters was linked to stress and negative emotion for mothers but not for fathers.

And in 2019, Lucia Ciciolla and Suniya Luthar surveyed 393 partnered American mothers, mostly affluent and well educated. Nearly nine in ten said they were mainly responsible for organising the family's schedules. Feeling responsible for monitoring the children's wellbeing was linked to feelings of emptiness and lower satisfaction with life and with their partner. The study is correlational, so it shows a link rather than a cause.

Why it's so hard to see

The mental load is invisible by design. When it's done well, nothing happens: no missed appointments, no empty fridge, no forgotten birthday. It only becomes visible when it fails, which is why the person carrying it rarely gets credit and the person not carrying it can honestly believe things are fair.

I've written about pieces of this before: the list nobody writes down in The List That Never Gets Written Down, and the cost of reminding in The Reminder Tax.

Questions people ask

Is the mental load the same as emotional labour?

They overlap but aren't the same. Emotional labour, a term from Arlie Hochschild's 1983 book The Managed Heart, originally described managing feelings in paid jobs. The mental load is about planning and remembering. In families, the same person often carries both.

Can it be shared?

Yes, but not by handing over single tasks. It gets shared when one person takes over a whole area, including the noticing and the checking, so there is nothing left to remind them about.

How do I start the conversation?

Write the list down together, including the thinking steps, not just the chores. Seeing it on paper is often the first time the other person understands how much there is.