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You don’t feel exhausted because you have too much to do. You feel exhausted because too many decisions are still open.
In this episode, I break down how “open loops” — the unresolved questions quietly spinning in your brain, are driving your mental load and keeping your nervous system activated all day long. I share the simple decision framework I teach my clients that instantly brings relief. This isn’t about better organizing. It’s about deciding differently. And when you do? Everything shifts.
In this episode, we unpack:
Why unfinished decisions drain more energy than a full calendar
What “open loops” are and how they secretly drive mental exhaustion
The four most common loops: leadership, relational, daily focus, and parenting
Why your brain treats undecided as urgent
The 5 decision options that immediately close loops and create relief
Work with me:
Ambitious & Balanced: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/ambitiousandbalanced
Book your Break Free From Stress Strategy Call (with free Quiz!): www.ambitiousandbalanced.com/break-free-from-stress
Our Sponsor:
NannyTrack helps families who employ a nanny understand what’s required, track pay and PTO, estimate taxes, and prepare to file correctly themselves. Try it free for 14 days, no credit card required. https://tracknannypay.com/
Transcript
Hey, working moms. You don't feel overwhelmed because you have too much to do. You feel overwhelmed because too many decisions are still open conversations that you haven't had, a project you're not sure who should own, the lingering tension with your boss, the daily “what should I focus on?” spiral. Right?
Those aren't just thoughts. They're open loops. And your brain treats unfinished decisions as urgent. So even when nothing is technically on fire, your nervous system stays slightly activated, slightly behind, slightly unsettled.
In this episode, I'm breaking down how open loops quietly drive your mental load and the simple decision framework that can immediately bring relief.
This isn't about doing more or even organizing better. It's about deciding differently.
If you feel like you've been carrying the mental load for weeks, if not years on end, then this episode is for you.
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.
Mental Load Series: Making the Invisible Visible
Well, hello there, working moms. I'm excited to be with you today.
We are continuing on a little series around the mental load, right? And last week we talked about the first mental load hack, which was you got to get it out of your head, right? We talked about how the mental load isn't about the number of tasks that you have. It's the invisible tracking, remembering, anticipating, and emotional holding behind those tasks. Right?
We talked about writing all of those things down that are in your head, like literally naming what it is you're carrying and making invisible visible. Right? And that alone brings a lot of relief. It gets it out of your head. And you can't really do anything about all of the various tasks and the mental load that you're carrying until we get it out of your head.
But today we're going to go one step further.
Hack 2: Closing Open Loops to Reduce Mental Load
We're going to talk about Hack 2. Because getting it out of your head is sort of like step one. Closing all of the loops once you get it out of your head is step two, right?
You can have a completely full calendar and feel calm, and you could have just three things that are sort of floating about in your mind and feel completely overwhelmed by them. Right? The difference isn't the number of tasks that you have to do, it's the open loops that are associated to those.
And the reason for this, at least in terms of what research shows us, is because our brains hold on to unfinished and unresolved tasks more intensely than completed ones. Right? Incompleteness is what creates cognitive tension and what we experience to be as mental load.
That tension is what so many of us as working moms carry all day long. It's not the number of tasks, it's too many unresolved decisions. Right? Or open loops, as we're going to talk about them here in this episode today.
What Is an Open Loop? Understanding Undecided Decisions and Mental Load
What is an open loop? Okay, so an open loop, as I like to talk about it, is an undetermined decision, right? It's something that exists without clarity. You don't know who owns it. You don't know when it's happening. You don't know what the next step is. You don't know what the outcome is that you're trying to create or whether it even matters to do it right now or not.
Research refers to this as cognitive labor. It's not the chore or the task itself, right? It's the planning and the monitoring and the deciding and then remembering it. The cognitive labor of unfinished decisions is what's taking up energy.
So here's what it sounds like in your head, okay. When you have a bunch of open loops, it usually sounds like questions. What should I focus on today? Should I be doing this or should I delegate this? I need to deal with that. How do I handle this? Am I doing this right? Why is this such a problem? What am I going to do about this situation?
Questions without decisions become open loops, and loops create mental load. It's not just the doing that exhausts us, it's the deciding, or really the not deciding.
The Leadership Loop: Open Questions About Ownership and Responsibility
So let me give you some examples from some of my clients around what these open loops kind of sound like or feel like, okay.
First I'm going to talk about the leadership loop. My client Sally leads a large team, manages a bunch of leaders, and her brain is constantly toggling between what should I be doing, what should they be doing? What outcomes am I responsible for? What outcomes are they responsible for?
When ownership isn't really clearly defined in leadership, your brain sort of keeps revisiting it, right? That's mental load. That's cognitive load. That's an open loop.
And I find this level of mental load really hits a lot of women when they hit about mid-career, when they start managing teams and managing people. When you're no longer just doing the work, but now you have to delegate the work and you have to feel responsible for other people's work, this creates a lot of mental load as you are asking lots of open questions to yourself around what they should be doing, what you should be doing, what you're responsible for, if they're doing it right, if you're describing it right, if you're going to be taking responsibility.
So many open questions that come with leadership loops.
Relational Loops: Tension With Your Boss That Never Gets Resolved
Now let's talk about relational loops. My client Sam is navigating a lot of tension with her boss, right? Her open loop wasn't really a task. It was these questions about how to kind of manage up with her boss. Do I address this? How do I handle this with her? Can I keep working like this? Why is she like this?
Nothing was necessarily happening with her boss specifically, but this sort of tension with her boss and how to handle it was this open loop. Tension-filled relationships always cause open loops for us because we're not really making decisions on how to handle those tense relationships.
The Daily Focus Loop: “What Should I Be Working On?”
Then there's one that I know all of us can relate to. I call it the daily focus loop, right? My client Katie, she'd sit down with a full list of things to do for her workday. But she had this question like, oh my gosh, what should I be working on? What's the first thing I should do? What's the most important thing I should do?
Never really making a decision, everything on her list feeling urgent. And so it was causing a lot of kind of poor time management, procrastination. And that becomes an open loop for us.
The Parenting Loop: Same Frustration, No New Decision
The fourth type of open loop I call the parenting loop. For example, if every morning your child has a hard time getting dressed, they always need your help. Maybe they're running around the house and you have to chase them. They don't want to put their shoes on, they don't want to put their jacket on. They're in full resistance mode, right?
The loop might sound like, what am I supposed to do? When are they going to grow out of this? Is this normal? Is this just a phase? Why is this so frustrating?
Same scenario every day, same question, same frustration, but no actual decision on how to do it differently tomorrow. That's an open parenting loop, and it's exhausting unless you do something about it.
A Quick Word From Our Sponsor
Before we talk about why open loops are so exhausting and the hack I have for you today, I want to take a quick break and share a word from our sponsor, Nanny Track.
If you employ a nanny, there's an administrative side of child care that most families don't see coming. And what I've learned from my clients that have nannies is that once they hire someone, they're suddenly a household employer. And they're always surprised by that. They say it sort of feels like running a tiny business.
I've watched how quickly this becomes overwhelming for my clients. The IRS estimates it can take up to 60 hours a year to figure out, which is why a lot of families either feel stuck or end up paying a lot for full-service payroll help.
Nanny Track is a simple, affordable DIY tool that helps you stay organized, track pay and PTO, estimate taxes, and get everything ready to file correctly. It's just $49 a year, and you can try it free for 14 days at tracknannypay.com
Okay, let's dive back into the show. Why are open loops so exhausting?
Why Open Loops Feel So Mentally Exhausting
So let's talk for a moment about why open loops are so exhausting, okay?
Your brain doesn't like unresolved decisions. That's what the open loop is, right? It's an unresolved decision. It interprets undecided as also unfinished. And unfinished always feels urgent, right? We always feel like we should be doing something that is unfinished. We should be closing that loop. We should be finishing that task.
And so every unresolved decision is sort of like an open tab in your brain, right? That you're constantly toggling between all of the time. And that burns a lot of your cognitive energy. Not because there's too much to do, but because you haven't landed on what you should be doing, how to change what you should be doing, what, when, where, why you should be doing any of those things.
The Simple Hack: Close Loops With One Clear Decision
So here's the hack I have for you today. Closing loops with one clear decision, right?
Closing a loop doesn't necessarily mean finishing the task. It just means landing on a decision about the task. For any open loop, you need to decide, when is this going to get done? Am I the person to get it done? What's the outcome of it happening? What should I be doing differently?
Literally, you are answering the questions that your brain is looping around over and over and over again. And the moment that decision is made, your brain is going to release some of that tension. You're going to relax a little bit more. It's not going to mean that the task is totally going to disappear from your to-do list, but your brain is going to feel clearer because you have a plan. A lack of a plan creates a lot of mental overwhelm.
I like to tell my clients that there's only ever five things you could do with the task. You could do it in that moment, you could delay it till a different time, you could delegate it, you can downshift it so that you change expectations, or you could dump it all together and not do it at all, right?
With every decision that you are faced with, with every task that you have to do, it's only going to be one of those five things. And once you decide what it is you're going to do with each task, with each question, you're going to feel so, so much better. You're going to release so much of that mental load that you carry.
Why Delegation, Confrontation, and Saying No Feel So Risky
I know that delegation feels risky, right? Because then you don't know how they're going to handle a task or a project. If it's going to be at the level that you want it to be, it feels risky because it might come back to you.
Confrontation, if there's like relational discord, also feels scary. How are they going to respond? What are they going to think about you?
Saying no, I'm not going to do something. I can't do that right now. No, I can't do that for you. I can't. I'll have to do that next week. Saying no feels selfish. And so we don't like doing it.
Choosing to not do a task or delay a task feels wrong oftentimes because our brain thinks that we should be doing everything all of the time, right? So we leave these sort of tasks and decisions open. We decide not to do anything about them. We don't delegate the thing, we don't address the relationship. We don't say no. We choose not to fix it.
But leaving tasks open, leaving decisions open actually costs more energy than deciding.
Relief Comes From Clarity, Not More Effort
So the mental load is caused by too many things sort of swimming about in your head. That's what we talked about last week, and that hack was to get it down on paper, get it out of your head so the invisible becomes visible.
This week, the hack is to make some decisions about things that are causing stress, causing overwhelm, feel hard, create anxiety, right? Because relief is going to come from clarity.
Close One Loop Today
And so today I invite you to close one loop. Maybe it's not even the biggest one that's stressing you out, but maybe it is.
Maybe it's just, what's the one thing I'm going to focus on today? Who owns this? Who am I going to give this to? What's my approach going to be to this? How am I going to solve this today? If this was solvable, how would I solve it?
You decide.
Find one open loop that you've been sort of mulling over in your head, which is creating mental exhaustion. And decide, instead of thinking about it, decide it, schedule it, delegate it, drop it, land it, dump it, whatever you need to do, close the loop so you create some rest in your mind.
And I want you to do that one loop at a time. That's our hack for today.
Ready for Support?
I will be here next week talking about another hack for your mental load to help relieve the exhaustion that is happening in your mind.
And look, if all of this feels overwhelming, like you really don't know where to start, the list is too long, the open loops, the decisions that have to be made are too much for you right now, I am offering a very special 30-minute call with me called a Break Free From Stress Strategy Call.
We are literally going to hone in together on what those tasks are that are causing overwhelm, that are causing stress, that are getting in the way of you experiencing the ambitious and balanced life that you deserve.
Working moms, you don't have to go at this alone. I am here to help you and support you.
If you have not booked that Break Free From Stress Strategy Call, I encourage you to do that. When you sign up for that call, you're going to take a quiz that helps us understand exactly what it is at the root of your stress. That's going to give us a lot of information.
And then you're going to schedule that 30-minute call with me for us to talk about that stress and ultimately walk away with a single tool to help you manage your stress better moving forward.
I would love to help you. You can find a link to booking that strategy call in the show notes. Again, it's called a Break Free From Stress Strategy Call.
Cannot wait to talk with you to help you find relief this year and in this upcoming season.
Until next week, working moms, let's get to it.
Ending Every Day Feeling Behind? It’s Not Time Management — It’s a Stress Pattern
Hey, before you go, quick question. Are you ending most days feeling behind? No matter how much you get done?
If this is happening right now, it's not a time management problem. It's a pattern. And stress patterns don't fix themselves. They compound.
Most working moms don't actually need more time. They need to feel back in control.
Inside my Break Free from Stress Strategy Call, we spend 30 focused minutes identifying exactly what is driving your overwhelm and mapping out a clear shift, so you stop reacting and start leading your life again.
If you're tired of white-knuckling your weeks, don't put this off. Go to the show notes and click on the Break Free from Stress Strategy Call link to schedule your call right now.
All right, working moms, till next week, let's get to it.
