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What is the mental load, exactly? The idea is forty years old

· 3 min read

The term dates from 1984, and it never meant simply "having a lot on". What it describes, what it does not, and why it is so often mistaken for tiredness.

The phrase has been everywhere since 2017. You hear it over dinner, on podcasts, at the school gate. Like every phrase that catches on, it has come to mean a bit of everything: being tired, having too many meetings, writing the shopping list in your head during one of them. Before we measured anything at home, we wanted to know what it meant in the first place.

1984: a sociologist and a car factory

The idea comes from France, from a 1984 article by the sociologist Monique Haicault in Sociologie du travail, "La gestion ordinaire de la vie en deux" (roughly, "the ordinary management of a life split in two"). She was then studying women on the production line at the Renault plant in Dreux, who also ran their homes. What she described was not the "double shift", which was already well known. It was something else: being physically at work and mentally at home. The mind keeps being taken up, again and again, by thoughts that belong to another place and another time.

That is the heart of it. The mental load is not the amount there is to do. It is the way the home occupies your head while you are somewhere else. You are at your desk and wondering whether there are any nappies left. You are on holiday and you know the MOT is due in three weeks.

A definition you can reuse

Nicole Brais, a researcher at Université Laval in Quebec, offers a version that is easier to remember. In her definition, the mental load is the "constant and unavoidable work of managing, organising and planning the smooth running of the home, with the aim of meeting everyone's needs" (our translation).

Three verbs: manage, organise, plan. None of them can be seen. Nobody comes home in the evening and says "I planned today". And yet it is that work which means there is a present ready for a friend's birthday party, rather than one grabbed in a hurry at the petrol station.

2017: the comic that set it all off

The term left the social sciences in May 2017, with a comic by the French illustrator Emma, "Fallait demander", soon translated as "You should've asked" and run in English by The Guardian. The title sums up a scene that a great many people recognised: she is the manager of the household, her partner waits to be told what to do, and when she reaches the end of her tether, he says she only had to ask. The comic went viral, and it is what brought "the mental load" into everyday English.

What it shows, and what research would confirm two years later, is that asking is already work. Knowing that something needs asking, when, of whom, and then checking it has been done: all of that stays with the same person.

2019: four stages, and two that rarely get shared

The American sociologist Allison Daminger interviewed 35 couples at length about how a household decision actually unfolds. Choosing a nursery, sorting out insurance, planning the holidays. She identified four stages:

The finding is clear. Decisions were often made together, and men took some part in looking at the options. But anticipating and monitoring, the two invisible stages, fell mostly to women. Men, in the words of the JSTOR Daily summary, "stepped in to participate in making decisions", and could come away feeling they had played their part.

That is why "who decides?" measures very little. The useful question is "who thinks of it beforehand, and who checks afterwards?". It is the one we ask on this site.

2023: it can finally be measured

Since 2023, the mental load can also be measured. A team of work psychologists (Wayne, Mills, Wang and colleagues) validated a nine-item scale that separates three dimensions: the managerial load (coordinating, organising), the cognitive load (keeping things in mind, processing information) and the emotional load (worrying about the family's wellbeing).

That last dimension is the one most resistant to sharing, according to a study of 2,309 Italian mothers published in Frontiers in Sociology. You can hand over the shopping. It is much harder to hand over the worrying.

What it is not

Two confusions come up again and again.

The first: the mental load and overwork. A 60-hour week at the office is exhausting, but it is not the mental load in Haicault's sense: no other place is taking over your mind.

The second: the mental load and the number of tasks. Two people can spend exactly the same hours on cleaning and cooking, and one of them can still carry the whole mental load, because they are the one who knows when it needs doing and who reminds the other. The reverse is true too: the person who puts in fewer hours is not necessarily the one who thinks least. At home, for us, the paperwork and the car take little time and a lot of headspace.

Why we put it in the result

Hours are what official statistics measure. In the UK, the Office for National Statistics found that women did 60% more unpaid work than men: 26 hours a week against 16. That gap matters, but it says nothing about who keeps track.

When we started our spreadsheet, we counted the hours too. It gave a fair picture of the time, and a feeling that something was off. Time did not show who was holding the household together. So we added a "who thinks of it" column, task by task, and the table finally looked like real life.

The site follows the same principle: for each task, two questions. Who does it, and who thinks of it. The answers are often the same. Where they differ is exactly where you find what Monique Haicault was describing forty years ago. You can take stock at home in about ten minutes; our article on paid work then looks at the whole week.

Sources and further reading

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