The Cost of Mental Load: Why Busy Families Need Support

What is the ‘Mental Load’ and how is it affecting families?

When your commitments stack up, they can seem overwhelming. The various responsibilities in your life mould together until it’s hard to draw a line between them. Your work bleeds into your home life, your home life travels with you to work. Your to-do list becomes a jumble, and seems to always be growing.

After a while, it can be hard to tell where one form of stress ends and another begins.

This is the ‘mental load,’ the sum of the various responsibilities we carry with us through life. As any working parent will tell you, it becomes significantly more challenging when you have children, but it can affect anyone.

This is especially true for women, who tend to manage a far greater share of responsibilities around the house while also working full-time jobs.

If left unmanaged, mental load can lead to burnout. This is a feeling of exhaustion that arises when our mental load becomes too overwhelming to deal with. It can lead to anxiety and depression, and seriously impact your quality of life.

Thankfully, there are ways to manage your mental load. Even if you’re a parent, a busy professional, a business owner, a carer, dealing with an attention deficit disorder, or all of the above, you can take steps to reduce your mental load and live a less stressful life.

The mental load in numbers

Researchers around the world have studied the causes and impact of mental load and have found some worrying data.

The statistics are a sobering reminder that, as our responsibilities mount up, our mental health comes under threat. Worse, research into the mental load reveals worrying inequalities, especially between men and women.

Here are some of the headlines you may see concerning the mental load:

Mothers bear the brunt of the mental load

One side of the family is under much more mental load than the other. According to research from the University of Bath and University of Melbourne, women manage 71% of the tasks in their household, while men are responsible for just 45%.

This adds up to around two hours of unpaid work every day for women – a whole 60 hours per month. (That’s a whole additional working week every month for mothers.)

The disparity in mental loads is often cited as a consequence of the gendering of domestic work. With tasks like cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the children stereotypically seen as examples of ‘women’s work,’ it is often assumed – perhaps even expected – that women will shoulder the responsibility for this unpaid labour.

Our mental loads have increased since the pandemic

The COVID-19 lockdowns not only made the impact of mental load more visible, it also exacerbated the amount of mental load we deal with.

With families stuck at home, parents – especially mothers – found themselves handling a new list of responsibilities such as teaching, managing home offices, and keeping the kids busy during the day. Many of these responsibilities have persisted beyond the pandemic, meaning parents now work with larger mental loads than before the pandemic.

Studies have found that women’s responsibilities around the house increased as much as 68% during the pandemic, with 57% reporting that they were experiencing more distractions at work. These studies also linked higher mental load to an increased incidence of mental health disorders such as depression.

As mental load increases, work performance decreases

When we feel stressed in our personal lives, we often bring that stress to work. This can, in turn, lead to higher workplace stress, lower productivity and higher rates of quitting. It’s been all but proven that the so-called ‘Great Resignation’ during the pandemic was a result of the increased mental load people experienced at the time.

Employers should take particular notice of these facts, as they may be directly impacting the quality of your employees’ work. Your employees who are struggling in their personal lives may also find themselves struggling to concentrate on their work, which could put them at risk of quitting.

How to share the mental load

Naturally, we’d all like to reduce the stress in our lives. But that is often easier said than done.

Having said that, there is one change you could make right now that will have a significant impact on your own mental load.

Offload your tasks

Mental load is an accumulation of tasks. It’s caused by having too much on your plate. So - while it may sound overly simplistic - the easiest and most effective thing you can do, starting right now, is to offload some of those tasks to someone else.

There are many ways you can go about this. You could speak to your partner and ensure they are taking on their fair share of tasks around the house. You could speak to your parents and see if they could help out. You could even get your kids involved, if they are old enough to start helping.

But then again, this just keeps your tasks circling around the family. And it’s likely they’ll make their way back to you eventually.

Choosing a personal assistant

So, the next option is to offload those tasks entirely – to get them out of the family, and out of the house. This is where a personal assistant comes in handy.

A personal assistant is someone who can manage household tasks on your behalf. They’ll take care of your frustrating, exhausting, time-consuming tasks, while also keeping track of your calendar and planning ahead. They’re on-call throughout the day, meaning you won’t have to think about your tasks (especially while you’re at work), and they work in the background, getting things done while you focus on other things.

With a personal assistant, you could offload countless tasks and reclaim precious hours in your life.

Have you discovered BlckBx?

With BlckBx, you get your own personal assistant to help reduce your mental load.

With a handy app connecting you to a real, dedicated and professional personal assistant, who’s on-hand throughout the week, you could offload any number of tasks.

It’s easy to get started, and you could start reducing your to-do list right away. Why not give us a try and discover what life is like without the mental load?

Are you an employer?

You might be interested to know we also offer BlckBx as an employee benefit. You can’t solve all the problems in your employees’ personal lives, but you can help to ease some of the burden by offering them a BlckBx subscription. Speak to us today to find out more about how BlckBx can benefit your employees.