The mental load is something talked about often on the internet. See what it is, how, and why minimalism can help you manage your mental load.
WHAT IS THE MENTAL LOAD?
The mental load is only one of three categories of invisible labor. These three categories overlap with one another. Briefly, they are as follows: cognitive labor, emotional labor, and the mental load.
Cognitive Labor
Cognitive labor is thinking about all the practical elements of running a household. It includes the meal planning, scheduling appointments, and organizing playdates.
Emotional Labor
Emotional labor is assisting in regulating the family’s emotions. Comforting a crying childing, calming down an angry one, and troubleshooting friend disputes are all examples of emotional labor.
The Mental Load
The mental load is the intersection of cognitive and emotional labor. It means anticipating and planning what needs to be done to make the household run efficiently and peacefully.
Always Having to Remember
As explained in her 2017 comic that resounded with women throughout the world, Emma explains that the mental load means “always having to remember”. Having to remember the checkups and dentist appointments. Remembering to Change the furnace filter and where the library books got to. When the last time the kids had a bath, and when the toothpaste is running out. Even when men in relationships strive to perform more than half of the household chores, it is often women who carry the burden of ensuring they are able to do so. A wife may be doing fewer loads of laundry a week, but she is still the one to remember to purchase detergent. She may not have to shuttle children back and forth to practices, but she is the one who signed them up, bought appropriate cleats, and put the practices on the family calendar.
Emma has good suggestions at the end of her comic about how to better manage the mental load between partners. Emma offers three recommendations for sharing the mental load. First, employers should offer more paternity leave. Second, families should allow boys to more readily participate in “family play” from a young age. Finally, couples should evenly divide recurring non-critical chores. These will all help men share more of the burden of the mental load. But what if we could go further? What if, instead of just finding out how to manage the mental load, we could reduce it overall?
HOW CAN MINIMALISM REDUCE THE MENTAL LOAD?
Research has proven that a cluttered home is a stressful home. In an article published by the New York Times, Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi writes about the link between clutter and stress:
Darby Saxbe, an assistant psychology professor at University of Southern California and the study’s lead author, said that the women in the study who described their home as being cluttered or needing work began their day stressed and remained stressed. Some of the added stress, she suspects, was tied to women’s tendency to take on housework and extra chores after the workday. In terms of cortisol levels, men who did more housework in the evening were as likely to have raised cortisol levels at the end of the day as women. It’s just that not as many men spent as much time on housework as their wives, she said.
Le Beau Lucchesi, Emilie (2019). The unbearable heaviness of clutter
In a follow-up study, Dr. Saxbe studied the cortisol level in the afternoon and evening, a time when stress should be dropping in “an adaptive recovery.” Not everyone in the study was bothered by shoes left on the staircase or mail piled on the coffee table. But again, women were more likely than men to complain about clutter or having too many unfinished projects, and did not show a cortisol reduction.
Saxbe, D. E., & Repetti, R. (2010). No place like home: home tours correlate with daily patterns of mood and cortisol.
Both of these studies show that clutter disproportionally affects women. In assessing this research through the lens of the mental load, it is easy to see how reducing clutter might in part reduce the mental load.
Freedom From Clutter
Hotel rooms are relaxing to go to because of this. Renting a space outside of our home means renting peace of mind and helps us manage the mental load. When staying at a hotel for vacation all the chores that are visually present in a home are missing. We’ve only brought the necessities, someone else comes in and cleans for us, and it is a small space that is easy to pick up. For most of us it is not realistic or sustainable to go live in a hotel. Minimalism can afford us some of the same mental load reduction.
Having fewer possessions to maintain and categorize allows more brain energy to be devoted to the tasks that cannot (and should not!) be reduced from life. In a minimalist life freedom from clutter means freedom for greater things.
Starting to Simplify
When one considers the changing disparity between who has to manage the mental load and lessening the burden a consumeristic lifestyle adds to the load, it can be easy to get overwhelmed. As in all life changes, reducing our mental load initially takes more time and effort. Simplifying one’s live is not an easy task, but it is surely rewarding
As the saying goes, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. If you want to start on a minimalist journey but don’t know what to do first, I encourage you to evaluate your stressors around your home and choose just one to simplify. Look around and pinpoint that area that always causes you to roll your eyes. Ask yourself how this could be simplified to reduce your mental load. I would love to hear what you come up with below in the comments!
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