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This week, I’m kicking off a new series all about the mental load, and it could not be more timely. I woke up with that familiar heaviness so many working moms carry — the constant tracking, anticipating, remembering, deciding. Not just tasks, but the invisible thinking work behind everything. In this episode, I share the simplest, most powerful thing I did before my tea even finished boiling that helped me feel lighter, calmer, and more in control. If your brain feels like it’s running overtime and you’re tired of holding everything in your head, this is a must-listen.
In this episode, we unpack:
What the mental load actually is (and why it’s not just your to-do list)
The concept of cognitive labor and how it impacts your emotions
Why your brain is acting like an overzealous intern
The simplest mental load “hack” to create instant clarity
How visibility and clarity immediately reduce overwhelm
Your next steps:
The Daily Kickstart {free download}: www.ambitiousandbalanced.com/daily-kickstart
Book a Break Free from Stress Strategy Call: www.ambitiousandbalanced.com/break-free-from-stress
Transcript
If you feel mentally exhausted before the day even starts, this episode is for you.
This morning, I woke up with that familiar heaviness that I know so many working moms experience. A running to-do list of things in my head, remembering decisions that need to be made, behaviors to address, questions to answer.
And I realized this is the mental load that so many working moms speak about. It's not the number of tasks that you have, but it's the constant thinking and tracking and anticipating and holding space for everything that nobody sees.
In this first mental load hack episode, I am sharing the simplest, most powerful thing that I did this morning to immediately feel lighter, calmer, and more in control before my tea even finished boiling.
If your brain feels like it's been working overtime, if you're tired of carrying everything in your head, if you want relief without adding another system or to-do, then this episode is a must-listen.
Are you ready? Let's get to it!
Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms podcast, your go to resource for integrating your career ambitions with life as a mom, I'm distilling down thousands of coaching conversations I've had with working moms just like you, along with my own personal experience as a mom of two and sharing the most effective tools and strategies to help you quickly feel calm, confident, and in control of your ambitious working mom life. You ready? Let's get to it.
Practical Mental Load Hacks for Working Moms: Taking Back Control
Hello, hello, working moms. I am so excited to be kicking off this series with you today, where we're gonna be digging into some very practical strategies to combat the mental load.
And it feels so timely that we are talking about this today and that I had planned this series because just this morning, I woke up with a laundry list of things on my mind, which was creating a lot of heaviness to my mental load. And so I feel like I could really talk about this from my own experience, even just today.
So over the next several weeks, you can expect some shorter episodes that are all highlighting what I'm calling a mental load hack to help you clear your mind and create some more emotional space as a working mom.
But before we even get into our first hack today, I want to offer something as we start this series because as I was organizing my thoughts this morning, I found myself almost angry on behalf of you and me and all the working moms out there.
Like why the heck are we the ones that carry so much? Why is it that men don't carry as much as we do or our partners don't carry as much as we do? Why is so much put on us as women to be the glue and the household managers of our families and of the society ultimately?
And unfortunately, this podcast alone is, of course, not going to solve the cultural problem that is deeply embedded in gender roles and in cultural norms. But I just wanted to start out by acknowledging the reality that in today's society, females take on more of the mental and emotional weight of our families, our marriages, and even of our workplaces.
So we're not going to get into much more about that today. But I think that acknowledgement is important. It was important to me to allow myself to get a little bit angry that I even have to make a podcast series about the mental load for working moms, right? And that the load is not equally distributed.
Okay, so let's get more into the practicality of what we can do about it, right? So if we're not going to solve the cultural gender norm issues of today, let's talk about the things that you actually have control over, which is you and your mental load.
What Is the Mental Load? Understanding Cognitive Labor in Working Moms
So let's talk for a moment about what the mental load actually is. Okay, so the mental load is not the number of tasks that you have on your to-do list, right? It's not about your busyness or like the demands of your time. The technical term to get into as we talk about the mental load is cognitive labor, right? That's the thinking work that's associated with organizing your life, particularly your family life.
It includes planning, anticipating needs, coordinating tasks, remembering deadlines and obligations, and decision making. In other words, the mental load is really associated to your thinking space, okay?
And so that's a really important distinction to be making because we're addressing what's going on in your head and how it's ultimately then affecting your emotions as well. And we're not trying to solve for your busyness, right? Does that make sense?
Now, I'm not suggesting that figuring out how to be more productive with your time and have less on your to-do list is not going to help your mental load. Of course it is, but I want you to see your to-do list and your task list as being almost something separate from the mental load that's going on.
Mental Load Hack #1: The Simplest Way to Clear Your Mind
So let's get into today's mental load hack. Now, this is a tried and true strategy. You might not even see it as a hack, but I'm going to talk about it here today. It's really the first thing I want to bring up as we get into this conversation over the next several weeks around the mental load because it's a simple tool that we sort of forget makes a really big difference for us.
And it's literally the first thing I did this morning, okay? I got a terrible night's sleep because of all of the things I was thinking about last night. So I rolled out of bed around 6:30. I walked out into the kitchen and I pulled out a notebook and a pen and I wrote everything down.
That's it.
Your Brain Is Not a Storage Unit: Why Writing It Down Reduces Mental Load
There's almost nothing you can do with your mental load until you get it out of your head and onto paper or into a digital note of some kind, right?
Your active brain is not meant to be a storage unit. It's meant to be a decision maker, right?
And so until you get out of your mind all of the things that are in it, you're going to have a really hard time making decisions about what to do and what to not do and how to address all of these things, right?
And so when I say write it all down, I mean, I want you to write all of it. Not just the things that need to get done. Those are your tasks, and I'm sure there's plenty of those as well.
I also want you to write out all the things that are weighing on you and stressing you out.
Some of the things that I wrote down this morning on my mental load list were things like washing my son's sheets, right? He's in an upper bunk bed, okay? And it has like a million stuffies on it, and he literally likes to sleep under 10 blankets. I can't imagine why. I'm sure he is a sweaty mess all night. It's gross, but it is sort of a beast to change those sheets.
And so my goal is that those sheets get changed at least once a month. It's a task that needs to get done. And it sort of just popped into my mind in the middle of the night. It was like, oh my gosh, when was the last time we washed those sheets? Okay. So I put that on my mental load list.
But also on my list that I wrote down were things like addressing my kids' oppositional comments, right? So my kids are in this little bit of a phase, a bit of a habit at the moment of sort of talking back to me and my husband, Darrell, and sort of being kind of an in opposition to anything we ask of them, right?
Simple things like you might say or I might say, I love you, and they'll respond back, no, you don't. Or I might say something like, hey, it's time to get dressed, bud. And my son might say something like, oh, you mean it's time to crawl back into bed and go to sleep?
Okay. It's kind of snarky. It's really irritating, and it's been sort of growing for some time, right? And my husband and I haven't really addressed how we're going to tackle that behavior yet.
So yes, it's sort of a task. Like there's a decision we need to make about how we're going to handle this, but it's really more of this cognitive emotional task where I am holding a lot of space for this sort of undesirable behavior of my kids and wanting to figure out how to fix it.
It's really more of this cognitive emotional task where I am holding a lot of space for this sort of undesirable behavior of my kids and wanting to figure out how to fix it.
The Hidden Layers of Parenting Decisions and Mental Load
Another task I wrote down was should I let my son take his Nintendo Switch on our trip down to San Diego next week?
Okay. This is so much more than just the decision. It's about how I'm going to keep the peace on a 10-hour road trip with my kids when it's just me and them. And am I willing to have a battle over the screen, and am I willing to put up boundaries once we arrive because I don't want him playing on the Nintendo Switch once we arrive.
Like there's all these layers of questioning and parenting and what's best. That's a part of this decision, a part of this task, right?
So I want you to write all of these things down. Things that need to get done, questions you need to answer, research you need to follow through on, emotions that you're carrying, anxiety that you're holding onto. How are you feeling? What are you thinking?
You got to clear out the storage space in your mind and get it down on paper or in some sort of note form.
Why Writing It Down Instantly Lightens Your Mental Load
Okay. And here's why I consider this sort of a hack because what's going to happen naturally is that some of these things that you write down instantaneously lose their heaviness and their weight just by getting them on paper and sort of your cognitive brain being able to see it more objectively, right?
Not all of them, maybe not even most of them, but I promise some of them are sort of going to magically fall off of your mental load simply because you get it out of your head.
So for example, the bedsheets with my son, right? I wrote that down and immediately I thought to myself, hey, when is my house cleaner coming? Oh my gosh, she's coming on Thursday.
Now she doesn't change the bedsheets on bunk beds because they're, again, really difficult to do, but almost instantaneously as I wrote that down and I remembered the house cleaner was coming on Thursday, my brain said, oh, I'll just do that on Thursday then when the rest of the house gets clean, right?
It was almost like I put it on the list and it immediately went off the list because I made a decision on how I was going to handle it.
Sometimes just getting out of your head the things that are in there brings clarity as to what that next step is or what the decision is that you need to make.
Clarity Is the Antidote to the Mental Load
And that's something I really want to emphasize here. Clarity. Clarity is the antidote to the mental load.
It's why it's the first step in almost any process I walk my clients through. Your brain needs a sense of direction. Your brain needs to know what the goal is. Your brain needs to be able to decide objectively what's most important, right?
And until these things get out of your mind, your brain can't get really clear.
And the reason why your brain is holding on to all of these tasks and anxieties and emotions and questions is because it doesn't feel clear on what it's supposed to do with each of them, right? Like there's literally no plan on how to tackle it.
So your brain holds on to it for you, right? That's your brain's job, to sort of be on your side and working on your behalf.
Your brain doesn't want you to be dropping the ball on any tasks. It doesn't want you to feel like you're a terrible mom or like you're letting people down at work.
So it's holding on to all of these tasks, action items, questions, emotions, and anxieties in an effort to make sure you don't forget about them and that you don't drop the ball.
Your Brain Is an Overzealous Intern Trying to Protect You
If I could give you an image, it would be this. Your brain is sort of operating like an ambitious overzealous intern, right?
That wants to do everything right for you, right? It wants to impress you. It wants to make you look good. It wants you to succeed. And the only way it knows how to do that is to just keep reminding you of all of these things that you're not doing and ways that you might be failing and things that you might be worried about so that you actually make a decision about what to do about them, right?
It's an overzealous, ambitious intern. You have to write it all down. You have to get it out of your head.
When I Wrote Pages of My Mental Load and Sent It to My Husband
I remember a particularly anxious season several years ago where I woke up one morning and wrote my entire mental load list down. It was literally pages long, and I sent a picture of it to my husband of all the things I was thinking about and worrying about and holding on to on behalf of our family, right?
Just so he could see. Just so I could have sort of a partner that was like, whoa, my gosh, you're holding a lot. I needed that sort of affirmation from him.
And now there were several things that happened as a result of me writing that down, conversations that we had, things that I delegated. We're going to get into that in a different episode here, but it all started with me admitting to myself and getting out of my head all of the things I was holding on to, carrying on behalf of me, my family, my work.
The mental load will start to decrease when you bring more visibility to it.
Break Free from Stress Strategy Call for Working Moms
And let me also just say that if you want some really practical support for your mental load and you want some strategy on how to overcome it, I am offering Break Free from Stress Strategy Calls.
These are 30-minute calls where we are going to identify what exactly is going on in your mind, where that mental load is coming from. I'm going to help you specifically identify it, and then we're going to talk about practical strategies on how to overcome it. I literally walk you through it for 30 minutes.
So if that feels helpful to you to help bring more visibility to your mental load and really break free from that, I encourage you to schedule your Break Free from Stress Strategy Call. There will be a link to that in the show notes.
If you want to book that, I encourage you to do that right now.
Three Key Mental Load Takeaways for Working Moms
But there's a couple of key points that I want to make sure you received from this episode today, okay?
So number one, your brain is not a storage unit. It's a decision maker. Okay? We're going to get more into the decision making hack in, I believe, in our next episode.
Number two, a portion of your mental load will decrease simply by getting it out of your head, right? Because it gives opportunity for your higher brain, that's your prefrontal cortex, to see the task and the things that you're worrying about and make an immediate decision on how to handle it.
And number three, your brain is always working on your behalf. It's operating more like an overzealous intern that wants to help. Which means you need to manage your intern. You got to give them direction.
That's what getting this all out of your head ultimately is going to do.
For me, after I wrote all of these things down that were in my head this morning, almost immediately I took care of a few of them just because they were sort of easy and I could do it while my tea water was boiling, right?
And I felt immediately lighter, emotionally more free, and a lot more in control of the things that were weighing me down.
I want the same for you. I want you to feel that emotional freedom.
I promise some of it will alleviate when you just get it down on paper or into a note.
Practice that this week and come back again next week when I will go over another mental load hack.
Are you ready? So until then, let's get to it.
Start Your Day Calm, Clear, and In Control With the Daily Kickstart
If you wake up most days spinning with a hundred different priorities vying for your attention, then the Daily Kickstart is exactly what you need. It's a simple, six-step process that helps you get your thoughts out of your head, reset your mindset, and refocus on what actually matters.
It's designed to help shift you out of overwhelm and into calm, confident action before the chaos. This daily practice is the same tool I offer to all my clients, and it's going to show you exactly how to lead your day instead of react to it.
It takes just 10 minutes a day, and the impact will ripple through everything—your mood, your energy, your presence with your kids, and how you lead at work. My clients indicate time and time again that this tool was the one that made the biggest impact difference for them, and I'm offering it to you totally free.
You can download it by going to www.ambitiousandbalanced.com/daily-kickstart, and of course, I'll have that for you in the show notes as well.
All right, working moms, let's get to it.
