Mental load

This is about the amount of information you’re having to juggle inside your brain as part of your daily routine.

Some people may only have responsibility for themselves, and have relatively straightforward tasks and duties to remember and perform on a day-to-day basis. Other people have responsibility for multiple persons –babies, children or elderly relatives – as well as a responsibility for running and maintaining a household.

If you’re the elected head of the house, there may be (unspoken) expectations among all the other residents that you will (for example):
(i) know where everything is
(ii) know what timetable everyone has
(iii) know which clothes will need to be washed in time for which occasion
(iv) know, say, that the plumber will need to have the spare key, because no one will be in the house on that day.

You’ll know all this information because you’ve taken on a collective mental load, while others may have forsaken their responsibility. And since no one can see your mental load, no one else will know when it can get overwhelming – until you have a nervous breakdown, get ill or start to get angry.

One of the classic lines of dialogue in connection with mental load is, “You should have asked”. As in: “Rather than get angry, you should have asked me to help” or “Why didn’t you tell me you were struggling to cope?” To which a response could be:
“Since when did I become your line manager?” or “Why should I need to ask you? How about we take equal responsibility!”

Are you taking on too much mental load? If you are, is there anything you can do about it? Alternatively, are you avoiding your share of the mental load in your relationships? If so, can you make a change?