Eight types of hidden work cause women to feel overwhelmed

In today's fast-paced world, many women find themselves grappling with an invisible yet overwhelming burden known as the mental load. This is the often unrecognised mental work required to keep a household and family life functioning – from organising childcare and planning healthy meals to researching fun activities.

Leah Ruppanner, a professor of sociology at the University of Melbourne in Australia, and author of the book Drained, explains that there's not one form of mental load, however, but eight different types. From "magic making" to "meta-care," she says many of these are "boundaryless" and enduring. While men are taking on more at home, women are still overwhelmingly burdened by this hidden work, which can often result in burnout.

But it doesn't have to be this way. When we recognise that sharing this mental work benefits our health, wellbeing and relationships, it could also help encourage more couples to advocate for a more balanced relationship.

In the interview below, she speaks to BBC senior health correspondent Melissa Hogenboom about how societal expectations and norms contribute to the mental load.

It's when your thinking has this emotional layer, that's why it's so draining. It can sometimes bring you positive emotions when things go well, but the mental load can be the opposite – it can be emotional thinking work where you're constantly ruminating and it doesn't have an end. You don't take your washing with you on the walk around the neighbourhood, but you're taking that mental load with you.

What kept showing up was that women would describe their load as invisible, boundaryless and enduring and it was burning them out. I felt like we needed to get a handle on what it was so that we could help people start to lighten it, so here are the eight categories I came up with:

1. Life organisation

This is probably the most traditional understanding of the mental load, which simply refers to staying on top of planning tasks – all that invisible work needed to ensure the home is running smoothly.

2. Emotional support

This is when you're doing emotional thinking to make sure you're checking in on family, friends or co-workers. It also involves noticing others' moods and providing emotional support during big or small moments.

3. Relationship hygiene

Maintaining strong social connections with your children, friends, partner and extended family. At work you might refer to it as networking – but mostly it's the work of making sure everyone feels connected and loved.

4. Magic-making

The emotional thinking about carrying on traditions and creating special life moments. Think about who creates the "magical moments" at Christmas and who does all the work to make that happen.

5. Dream-building

This relates to the work required to make sure everyone close to us is finding the right opportunities to fulfil their passions and ambitions. This might involve signing your children up to their ideal hobbies or ensuring your partner gets time to play golf or devote long hours to his career.

6. Individual upkeep

Think self-care but more – this load is about whether you are keeping fit and healthy to maintain or promote optimal physical and mental health – as well as presenting that image to others.

7. Safety

This involves thinking about whether your loved ones and community are safe in real and hypothetical ways. It's also worth recognising that certain parents carry heavier mental loads related to safety – people of colour and families in the disabled community for instance. This can involve a constant worry about their own and their families' safety.

8. Meta-care

This is a little bit more abstract but relates to thinking about whether you're working on creating the world in which you want to live in or whether you need to do something different. This involves thinking about your responsibilities within that domain and requires big-picture thinking to make sure we are living our lives in ways that align with our values. It's parenting in the way we want to parent, for instance.

I started studying the mental load in part because I felt like there was this thing that we weren't capturing. So I've studied gender, work, family, housework and domestic divisions for decades. And even though we kept seeing that men were doing more at home – we kept seeing this movement towards progress – there was this thing that just wasn't working, this thing that we weren't capturing, that we weren't measuring. That thing is the mental load. What I was determined to do was give us a clear understanding of what it is.

Just how drained were the women you spoke to?

I developed a mental load burnout scale where I actually asked women, do you find it difficult to access energy to respond to life's emergencies? Do you find your mental load "spending" makes you tired at the end of the day? Do you find you're overtaxed?

One of the things that came through was that fathers had capacity and weren't running a deficit but almost every single mother I talked to was. They were holding enough energy in their "mental load account" to respond to an emergency if something went wrong but when I asked: "do you have enough energy to respond to an opportunity in your life" they said no.

And how can we reduce this mental overwhelm?

For starters, we need to recognise that it's very valuable to feel your feelings, but you're not responsible for everyone else's feelings or for creating a perfect family. You are not responsible for creating a perfect world. I think getting very clear on the idea that many of us women have been socialised from birth to be kind, polite, caring, deferential and giving to others at the expense of yourself. Also, let's stop putting the ice on men's feelings. Let's stop telling women that they have to be responsible for everyone else's feelings at the detriment of themselves.

Let's make sure that we're identifying when we're doing too much. When do you really need to step in and give emotional support and when you don't. If we can get a little clearer that we don't act on default or the way we're told we should act, but actually be a bit more strategic. For instance, I always say to my daughter: "You can make the choice right now whether you're going to actually increase your energy or increase your emotion, but is it worth it?"

What should we take away from your research?

First, stop feeling so guilty and responsible for everything. I ran this pilot study where I gave women money to reduce their mental load and I found that it was so hard for many of those women to spend that money on themselves. What they wanted to do was give that money to the family to make everyone else's life better. They felt so guilty about taking it for themselves.

So, we have basically socialised women to feel like they should be at the bottom of the list and then any investment in themselves once they become mothers is at the expense of their children. What a ridiculous lie we've been told.

After a while though – and after spending the money, their mental load stress lessened. Did it solve all of their problems? Of course not! But it did lighten their loads a bit, and more importantly, they each experienced a valuable mindset shift and realised the importance of prioritising themselves.

One woman I gave money to, Katrina, spent it on a weekend away – and by being absent she wasn't thinking about the household. She told me that the money helped her live in the moment rather than fixating on additional expenses. When she returned home her partner had made sure the house was cleaned, the fridge stocked and laundry put away.

Once we get clear on our mental load spending (where we spend mental energy on), we can use our mental load strategically. Sometimes we need to outsource help to get there. Sometimes we need selfcare, sometimes both.

And actually, what the research shows is that the more empowered women are and the more educated they are – this gives them more access to the labour market and then in turn, they have more equal divisions of housework. Their relationships are better and men do better.

So when we think about empowering women, it isn’t just for their benefit, but for all of us.