The Mental Load Is Real — And It's Breaking Women's Mental Health

The concept gained widespread public attention after the French cartoonist Emma published a comic in 2017 depicting a woman mentally managing every detail of family life while her partner waited to be told what to do.^[8] The response from women around the world was immediate and visceral. They had a name, finally, for something they had been living for years. Emma's work was subsequently published as a book^[9] and has since been cited extensively in academic and clinical discussions about the unequal distribution of domestic cognitive labour.

The research has since caught up. The mental load is now a recognised area of sociological and psychological study, documented across multiple countries, cultures, and income levels — and its effects on women's mental health are significant.

What the Research Is Telling Us

The data on maternal and women's mental health over the past several years should prompt serious concern — and serious conversation.

A landmark study published in JAMA Internal Medicine in May 2025^[1], drawing on self-reported data from nearly 189,417 mothers in the United States from 2016 to 2023, found a sharp and consistent decline in maternal mental health across every socioeconomic group. In 2016, 38.4% of mothers reported excellent mental health. By 2023, that figure had dropped to 25.8%. The proportion reporting fair or poor mental health rose by 64% over the same period. Fathers also declined — but mothers were consistently and significantly worse off.

"We found a dramatic increase in mothers reporting fair or poor health — a 64% increase," said lead author Jamie Daw, assistant professor at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.^[2] "Declines in maternal mental health originated prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and were observed in nearly every socioeconomic subgroup examined."

In Canada, a 2025 national survey by Mental Health Research Canada^[6], conducted among 5,008 employed adults by Pollara, found that 39% of Canadian employees report feeling burnt out — up from 35% in 2023. Critically, burnout rates are higher among women and racialized Canadians, reaching 42% in those groups.^[7]

The connection to the mental load is not coincidental. When unpaid cognitive labour is invisible — when it is not counted, not shared, and not relieved — the person who carries it carries the consequences.



How the Mental Load Affects Mental Health?

The mental load does not just cause tiredness. Its effects on mental health are multidimensional and can be serious. Understanding what is actually happening — at a psychological and physiological level — can help women recognise that what they are experiencing is real, not a personal failing.

Chronic stress and the nervous system

Constantly monitoring, planning, and anticipating keeps the nervous system in a low-level state of activation. This is the same physiological mechanism underlying chronic stress — the body's threat-detection system, running continuously without adequate rest. Over time, chronic low-grade stress depletes the body's regulatory capacity, contributing to anxiety, irritability, poor sleep, and physical symptoms such as fatigue, headaches, and digestive issues.

The anxiety that has no single source

Many women living with a high mental load describe a persistent, free-floating anxiety — a sense of something being wrong or about to be forgotten, even in moments that should feel peaceful. This anxiety often resists the usual tools for managing it, because its source is not a specific worry or event. It is structural. It is the experience of holding too much, continuously.

This is one reason why women sometimes arrive at therapy having tried to manage anxiety for years without lasting relief. When the underlying cause is systemic rather than cognitive, addressing only the cognitive layer is not always enough.

Resentment, guilt, and the trap between them

The mental load frequently generates resentment — and resentment frequently generates guilt. Women may feel deeply resentful of partners who do not notice what needs doing, or who need to be asked, or who complete tasks without the anticipating and monitoring that accompanies those same tasks when women do them. At the same time, the resentment can feel unfair or ungenerous, and the guilt about feeling resentful adds another layer of emotional weight.

This cycle — resentment, guilt, self-criticism, suppression, resentment again — is exhausting in its own right, and it is extremely common among the women we see in therapy.

Identity erosion and loss of self

Many women describe a gradual loss of access to their own wants, interests, and identity as the mental load of managing others' needs expands to fill the available space. This is not dramatic or sudden. It is a slow drift in which the person who knew what she enjoyed, what she needed, and who she was becomes someone who primarily exists in relation to others' needs. Depression, low self-worth, and a disconnection from meaning are common consequences.

Physical health consequences

The mental load also takes a physical toll. Disrupted sleep — often due to the mental activity of running through tomorrow's logistics at 2 a.m. — is one of the most consistent effects. Chronic sleep deficit compounds every mental health symptom. Research from Health Council Canada notes that 58% of Canadian women report sacrificing sleep to manage their responsibilities — a pattern that, over time, is not sustainable.

Why 'Just Ask for Help' Is Not the Answer

One of the most frustrating pieces of advice given to women experiencing mental load overload is a variant of: "just ask your partner to help more" or "you just need to delegate." 

This advice, while well-intentioned, misunderstands the nature of the problem.

The issue is not that women fail to delegate physical tasks. It is that the cognitive and emotional responsibility — the noticing, the knowing, the anticipating — does not transfer when tasks are assigned. Research from the University of Bath and University of Melbourne^[3][4] specifically documents what they call "gendered cognitive stickiness": even when physical household labour shifts, the mental load remains with women across changing work patterns, income levels, and relationship structures.

In other words, a partner can cook dinner. But if you are still the one who noticed the fridge was getting low, remembered a family member's dietary preference, and planned the week's meals around upcoming commitments — you are still doing the mental work. The dinner itself is just the visible surface.

As The Conversation summarised the findings^[5]: "While mothers who earn and work more do less of the physical domestic tasks, the mental load remains unmovable."

This distinction matters therapeutically. Addressing the mental load requires conversations about structural change — how cognitive labour is distributed, acknowledged, and shared — not simply scheduling more tasks for partners to complete.

What You Might Be Feeling — and Why It Makes Sense

If any of the above resonates, you may have found yourself experiencing some or all of the following:

• Exhaustion that sleep does not fix — waking still tired, still running through the list
• Difficulty being present, even in moments you care about — parties, time with children, evenings at home
• Snapping, then feeling terrible — emotional dysregulation that does not match the size of the trigger
• A vague but persistent sense of being behind, even when you have done everything
• Resentment that you do not feel entitled to, and guilt about the resentment
• A grief-like feeling about who you used to be before you became the person who holds everything
• Chronic low-grade anxiety with no clear source
• A feeling that no one really understands how much you are carrying

None of these experiences is a personal failure. They are the predictable consequences of an invisible, unacknowledged, and disproportionate burden. They are also experiences that can be addressed — not alone, and not simply by trying harder.

How Mental Health Therapy Can Help?

Therapy cannot redistribute your household's cognitive labour on its own. But it can do several things that make a genuine difference.

Name and validate what is happening

For many women, the first and most powerful thing therapy offers is recognition. Having a space where the mental load is named, taken seriously, and not minimised can itself be significant — particularly for women who have struggled to articulate what is wrong when nothing is obviously, singularly wrong.

Untangle resentment, guilt, and self-criticism

Therapy provides tools for working through the emotional cycle of resentment and guilt without suppressing either feeling. Understanding where resentment comes from — and what it is actually signalling — is more useful than managing it. Approaches like Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) are particularly well-suited to this work.

Address the anxiety directly

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and related approaches can help reduce the cognitive patterns that amplify the anxiety generated by the mental load — the hypervigilance, the catastrophising, the difficulty tolerating uncertainty. When structural change in the home is slow or incomplete, building psychological capacity to manage the stress differently can provide meaningful relief.

Reconnect with identity and self

Therapeutic work focused on identity and values can help women begin to reconnect with who they are beyond their roles as manager, mother, partner, and professional. This is not a luxury. For many women, this is the difference between surviving each week and feeling a genuine sense of self and meaning.

Couples therapy: when the conversation needs facilitation

When the mental load is creating persistent tension in a relationship, couples therapy can provide a structured, facilitated space for conversations that are difficult to have well at home. Discernment, communication, and fair division of cognitive labour are all things that can be worked on in couples work — with a professional who understands the dynamics at play and can help both partners hear each other.

A Note on Not Carrying This Alone

If you are a woman in Barrie, Orillia, or anywhere across Ontario reading this and recognising yourself — please know that what you are experiencing is real, it is common, and it is not evidence of weakness or failure.

The mental load is a structural issue with profound mental health consequences. Reaching out for support is not adding one more thing to the list. It is choosing to get something back.