Sure, a bunch of flowers every now and then and a kind text out of the blue are nice, but what a lot of women really want is to just have the ‘mental load‘ equally split! We chat to an expert about exactly what the mental load is and her passion project, that she (and we!!) hope may change the tide…
Robyn Miller is a practising doctor who will finish her specialist paediatrics training in six months. She lives in Brisbane with her husband, five-year-old daughter, and one-year-old son.
Having degrees in medicine, public health, arts, and management (as you do), Robyn is the woman behind The Mental Load Project (mentalloadproject.com). For three years, she’s been personally running six-week online group courses to help women better share the mental load with their partners. The project has a strong social-media presence and Robyn’s emailed newsletters have titles like ‘Can I just copy/paste my mental load to my husband’s brain please’? To that, many of us will say, ‘yes please and also how?’.
Capsule: How would you describe the term ‘mental load’?
Robyn: The mental load, which is sometimes called emotional labour, is basically when one person is always thinking ahead and planning ahead to make sure things run smoothly in their household. I first heard the term mental load when French comic artist Emma [who goes by one name] introduced it in 2017 and I thought ‘wow, there’s a name for this!’. There is research on this now. If you’re a woman in a long-term, heterosexual relationship, there’s a 98% chance you will answer ‘no’ to the question ‘is your mental load fairly shared?’. Evidence shows that women carrying the mental load happens more after having children, because there’s just so much more to do.
Tell me about the Mental Load Project.
I started the Mental Load Project in 2019 when my daughter was one. I was working part-time and still had quite a lot of training [for paediatrics] to go. That was when it really hit me that there was this imbalance between what I carried in terms of the mental load, compared to my husband. We were both training to be specialists, but, since I became a mother, suddenly I was the one who was thinking about and organising all this stuff for our daughter – and doing that just wasn’t in my husband’s mind.
I thought ‘this is actually affecting my life [negatively]’. In the medical field, there are all these hoops to jump through, but although I could turn up at work, I didn’t have time for things like extra training to build my career. Paediatrics is one of the few fields of medicine that is female dominated. The women I worked with were very successful in their careers but were also the ones who had to remember to leave the money out to pay the cleaner. They were like ‘I can’t apply for that leadership position or that higher training, because I’m carrying this [mental] load’. All these tiny things add up and I thought ‘this isn’t really fair’.
There are apps – and also ‘mum hacks’ on social media – that supposedly help women manage the mental load. Do they?
This notion of ‘if you could get a bit more organised, it will be fine’ isn’t true at all. The idea that everything will run more smoothly if you’re just one step ahead is a fallacy. Actually, the more things you carry as part of the mental load, the less efficient you’ll be because there’s too much to coordinate. Things that come up in social media feeds about being a working mum might be something like ‘do all your meal prep for the month’ [at the same time]. But the more you take over the meal prep, the more your partner doesn’t get into the habit of thinking about the meal prep. If our husbands go to work, come home, are really involved parents, and make dinner, that’s great, but if they haven’t made sure they have the ingredients to make dinner, then it’s not fair.
For instance, my husband and I had these little arguments about, say, signing a form. I’d get quite annoyed about having to do things like that [myself] and my husband was like ‘why is it so important to you?’ He was working full-time, and was also on call, so he was like ‘can’t I just come home and not be ambushed with all these little things?’. He actually said ‘I think we need a better way’. I decided to look for one.
How did you begin?
I started talking to people about the mental load. I thought surely someone must have worked out how to deal with it. But friends said things like ‘I wish my husband would see something needs doing, or think ahead like I do’. It was usually the woman who had to remind her partner to pick up the milk, or to get things organised for going away on the weekend.
I did a lot of research, and also looked at my thinking process. I realised all this is about subconscious habits. Women have been conditioned over generations to feel responsible for and notice things. We think of what needs doing, then we just do it. The more I did this, the less those things were front of mind for my husband. And he got into the habit of just helping out where he could, rather than taking on something himself. So I combined my expertise in family therapy, organisational management and neurocognitive science to develop a step-by-step strategy to balance the mental load with my husband – and it worked, so I shared it with others.
Is it about dividing tasks 50/50?
Well, what is often suggested with the mental load is ‘just work out all the things that need doing, and split them in half’. But if you’re the one maintaining that roster on the fridge – if you’re the one saying ‘remember to do x today’ – in that way, you’re still carrying the mental load. These habits are perpetuated until you deliberately make a change. I’ll be running a free webinar soon to share some of the common mistakes couples make when trying to share the mental load – and how to avoid them!
What is the most important thing?
Divide not delegate. Divide the tasks, then one person needs to remember all of the ‘doing stages’, without being reminded. For instance, everything related to a child’s after-school care. Actually, a friend of mine was returning to a job after maternity leave, so her younger child would be going to daycare, and her older child would be going to after-school care. My friend was very organised prepping for the after-school care. She had met the teachers, looked at the programmes, and planned the snacks to have ready in the car so the child wouldn’t have a meltdown after the longer day. Then the morning of, her husband said ‘Oh, she’s starting after-school care today?’
Men!
Well, if one person is more prepared, then the other person isn’t even thinking about it [the task], because they know it’s been organised. Why should they interfere when it’s all going so smoothly? So, rather than asking your partner to take on a little bit of a project or a task that you’d otherwise manage, I recommend dividing the entire responsibility and say something like ‘this year I’ll be responsible for the children’s swimming lessons, and you’ll be responsible for whatever other extracurricular activities they do’.
Often women struggle with stepping back and not having control over, say, which ballet class their child is in, because we’ve been so socially conditioned to feel responsible for all of that. You might not necessarily see the benefit immediately because you’re worried about it all, but as the months go by, usually women find ‘this is actually working and everything’s going fine and I don’t have to worry about it’.
Have you seen women really buckling under the strain of the mental load, as opposed to them thinking ‘oh I wish this could be a bit different?’
Definitely. It can end up in a vicious cycle of ‘you’ve got all the mental load therefore you never really switch off’, and you get fatigued, and you can’t sleep well because it’s all running through your head and so you get more fatigued.
I interviewed someone whose husband works full-time so she shoulders the mental load. She got mad when her husband put their son’s merino socks into the dryer and shrunk them. He said ‘are we really arguing about socks?’ She said ‘it’s not just about socks!’
Yeah. For many women, you’re managing to carry the mental load, then you get to a breaking point about something that seems trivial like socks. So I strongly advocate for addressing the issue at an earlier stage when you can be objective and descriptive. Otherwise, you end up with that defensive response of ‘what do socks really matter’ or ‘why does it really matter if we don’t have the right type of cheese to make pizzas this week?’. They might seem like minor things, but minor things keep a ship sailing.
Do women often carry the mental load even when the couple doesn’t have kids?
Yeah. Often from the moment a couple starts cohabitating, the woman is usually the one who RSVPs to a wedding you’re both invited to, sees what the dress code is and organises the gift from the registry. Even if it’s the man’s friend who is getting married!
You have a free downloadable resource called ‘How To Talk To Men About The Mental Load (Without Starting A fight)’. You say 1) Use the analogy of the workplace; 2) Use research to discuss the mental load generally; and 3) Use concrete, personal examples. So it isn’t about telling men not to be lazy?
No. We’ve been conditioned as women to think ahead, and it happens from a young age. For example, girls were often expected more than boys were to, say, pack their own bags, and write the Christmas card to grandma. It plays out over the course of our lifetimes but it’s not biological. Because, if it was biological, then no man could manage a project or run a team – but of course they can because anyone can! Yes, some of us are more natural leaders, or naturally more organised, but they’re all skills that can be learned.
You also have a free downloadable document about ‘ditching the overwhelm’. Has ‘the overwhelm’ become a noun in this Covid era?
I think it’s worth seeing ‘overwhelm’ as a noun – as more of an external [thing] – as opposed to something that describes ourselves as in ‘I’m overwhelmed’, because that can take us back to ‘shouldn’t I just be more organised?’.
You mention in the ditching-the-overwhelm resource that you can also ‘drop’ some things?
Yeah, you can decide what your family’s values are and drop the things that aren’t important. Maybe there are things you’re doing because everyone else is doing them, but actually when you think about it, they’re not high on your priority list. Are you trying to organise piano lessons because music is a strong value [or interest] of yours or your child’s, or do you feel like you should because your cousin’s child does piano? There’s no right or wrong thing, but it’s worth taking a restock of where your time and energy are going every so often, and whether this aligns with what’s important to you and your family.
Keep an eye out for part two of this story, coming soon: The Mental Load Pt 2: How One Woman is Teaching Women AND Men To Split the Mental Load.
