Balance & Beyond Podcast

There's a silent career killer lurking in your daily life, consuming your energy and holding you back professionally - the mental load.

That invisible project manager in your head with 50,000 tabs open is doing far more damage than you realise. 

The mental load creates a devastating double burden where you're essentially working two full-time jobs—one that pays and another where you labor endlessly without compensation. Research shows that up to 80% of women report home responsibilities prevent them from performing their best professionally. This burden often intensifies at crucial career advancement stages, creating a perfect storm where professional growth opportunities coincide with increased family demands from both children's activities and aging parents' needs. 

The consequences are profound. Talented professionals decline promotions, avoid new projects, and step back from advancement opportunities because they're already overwhelmed. As you maintain lists for everyone except yourself, your health, joy, friendships, and peace of mind become casualties. This self-neglect breeds resentment that manifests as impatience, irritability, and emotional exhaustion—until you inevitably reach a breaking point. 

Breaking free starts with understanding that household responsibilities exist in never-ending cycles without true completion points. Once you accept this reality, you can step away without guilt and prioritize yourself. Learn to fully delegate tasks—including the conceptualizing and planning aspects, not just execution—and genuinely let go. Allow natural consequences to occur and accept that "done" is good enough, even when it doesn't match your standards.

Your career shouldn't have to be sacrificed on the altar of mental overload. Take the first step today by identifying what you can drop, delegate, or dial back without guilt. What could you accomplish professionally if you weren't carrying everyone else's mental load?

Episode Transcript

INTRO: Welcome to Balance and Beyond, the podcast for ambitious women who refuse to accept burnout as the price of success. Here, we’re committed to empowering you with the tools and strategies you need to achieve true balance, where your career, relationships and health all thrive, and where you have the power to define success on your own terms. I honour the space you’ve created for yourself today, so take a breath, and let's dive right in…

Jo (00:42.014)

There is one thing eating up more of your time and energy than you realize, and it's probably killing your career. Today, we are talking about the mental load. The mental load is something that we are all too familiar with. And there's data out there that suggests up to 80 % of women have said responsibilities at home have stopped them from being their best at work.

And those responsibilities at home are typically the invisible project manager in your head with 50,000 tabs open, keeping yours and everyone else's life running. The challenge is, if we are not careful, the mental load will fundamentally kill your career because you end up doing two full-time jobs. You have one job where you're paid and one job where you work like a slave and are never actually paid for it.

I'm finding that as particularly women start to accelerate their careers and start moving into senior leadership, that often coincides with children getting a little bit older. And while they're not getting up at the night anymore to, you know, settle babies, they're dealing with exponential increase in activities. And they start moving into that true sandwich generation where they have parents who might also start needing their attention or extra family responsibilities.

So squeezed from above generationally and squeezed from below. And the logistics of managing all of this, the appointments and the things that you have to do and making sure this uniform is clean for that on this day are insane. And I speak from very lived experience because I'm in this exact same situation right now as you. I want explain to you some of the real world consequences of what happens when we don't understand the mental load and don't have a better system in place for how to deal with it.

Jo (02:37.91)

I know many women who have not taken a promotion or stepped up or taken on that new project because they feel like they can't cope with the way things are now. And there's no way that they'd be able to take on any more responsibility, budget, staff at work because they feel so overloaded. What tends to happen is when there's lists of lists of lists, you are never on any of them.

So as the list for everybody else gets bigger and all the things that you have to hold in your head gets bigger. You neglect your health, you neglect your joy, you neglect your friendships, and ultimately your sanity and your peace start to go out the window. Consequence of this, of never doing anything for yourself is a huge amount of resentment that you carry on a day to day basis. Impatient, grumpy, snappy, and really never your best self for the people you love the most. You save any energy you have for work because you can't typically snap there.

Although a sign that things are getting too bad is when you randomly burst into tears, probably in a big meeting at home, because it's all got too much. So giving everything for everyone else and having nothing left for yourself is an exact giving everything to everyone else and then feeling that resentment, that guilt, that level of exhaustion and knowing that the answer is not to run harder and faster.

And I promise you getting an app to manage your lists and colour coding them is not the answer out of the mental load either. So how did we get here? It may not surprise you that there is deep systemic and cultural conditioning in why we continue to hold the lion's share of the mental load. Now I'm not suggesting that men are useless. This is not a men bashing exercise and there are exceptions to every rule.

But by and large, I have found that a lot of women carry the bulk of the mental load. They may have support, whether it's with grandparents, parents, family, paid support, often on the execution of tasks, whether it's picking up the kid from school or doing the thing. But there's, as the brilliant people who manage the Fair Play system talk about, the mental load, every task has three components. There's the conceptualizing of the task. There's the planning of the task.

Jo (05:02.102)

Then there's execution of the task. So while we might get help with one, what we're not very good at is learning to delegate or outsource the conceptualizing and the planning of things. And that is what drives us nuts. It's why when someone tries to take credit for baking the cake or buying the birthday present, when you were the one who knew whose party it was RSVP to the invitation, found out what the kid liked, researched where to buy it at the best price and then ask somebody else to go out and buy it.

And they try to take all the glory for the actual buying of the birthday present. And you sit there fuming going, have no idea how many steps it took me just to get you to get the present. And then you probably had to nag them to get there in the first place. It's not very many generations ago that we weren't really able to work. And I think about my mom who was in her late seventies, she was really given four choices.

when she left school and that was she could be a secretary, a teacher, a hairdresser or a nurse. They were the only real professions open to women. So you think in one generation, we have gone from those options to almost everything. And she was told that she would be fired. My mom chose to be secretary. She was told that she would be fired the moment she got engaged because the assumption was you get engaged, you get married pretty quickly and you're going to get pregnant. And then there's no choice because there was no childcare. So off you go.

A woman's role was in the home and many of our men in our lives were raised that way. They saw their moms who did everything for everyone, whether they were the martyr or brewing in resentment didn't seem to matter. So what I have found is that both men and women still have this deep subconscious programming that that is a woman's role. Now, logically, they will fight you tooth and nail and most men I speak to, no, no, women can work.

You know, I'm all for it. I've got a daughter. I want to do this, but I've run a men's program and I poked. It took me about four minutes to get down to the deep heart of a man feeling like if he isn't providing, if he's not protecting his family, then he wasn't man enough. Now don't jump up and down and say, my God, what happened to feminism? I get that. But this wiring and this conditioning runs really, really deep. Doesn't mean we can't undo it.

Jo (07:22.392)

But to stick our head in the sand and pretend that everyone is okay with how roles have landed right now is an absolute fallacy. So women have stepped into the workplace we now lead in terms of university graduates and entrance places and all these things. And yet men often haven't picked up the slack at home. So we are still carrying two jobs. And it's no surprise with this huge change very, very quickly in gender roles.

There is a crisis amongst women who are burning out and still trying to do it all. And there's a crisis amongst young men who are also trying to work out who am I? What do I want? And the boom of tradwives and the Andrew Tates of the world trying to take men back to how it used to be when they knew their place. And there's a whole other podcast episode we won't get into today. But ultimately what that says is people are looking to find out who they are and where is their role in society.

That's how we work as humans. And when we don't know what our role is, then we feel very, very unsettled. So as a woman, it's important to understand that we have this deep subconscious wiring that says, I am not a good woman if my house isn't in order. I'm not a good woman if I'm not organized. And we were told we could do anything growing up, particularly those of us who were born in the late 70s and 80s.

But we interpreted that to mean we should do everything. So no surprise, we are holding onto everything and the complexity of our lives now, even versus 15 years ago, the complexity of our lives even compared to 15 year old, let's try that again. The complexity of our lives even compared to 15 years ago, beggars believe it has changed so much. The complexity of children and school and what is expected in technology. means that we are changing faster really than our nervous systems can cope with.

So now you understand where so much of this mental load comes from. Let's talk about how do we stop this mental load killing your career. Because I do not want another woman to step back from a role. I don't want her to not take a promotion because the bulk of these women who I know are breaking under the weight of the mental load are ambitious.

Jo (09:49.964)

And they've got so much to give and they know they've got more potential, but they feel like their family is suffering and they can't put the kids back in their mind. There's no choice, but to hold everything at home because no one else is going to do it. And so the only thing that can give is work. And so they look to go part-time or they drop days or they try to change their hours in order to facilitate it. But I've seen time and time again, the mentor load will just expand to how much you give it.

So even if you drop a day, those women still end up often working on that day or that day just ends up running all the errands that somehow appear to take its place. I don't want to negate the fact that when you are juggling the mental load, it can be really hard. It can be exhausting, it's overwhelming and waking up at three in the morning with this list of crazy things you have to do is not a fun way to live.

So I want to share with you some radical but very small step that can help you drop what is not yours to carry and realize that the mental load doesn't have to be the career killer that it may be for you right now.

First up, I always like to start with a mindset shift. And the most important mindset shift around the mental load is I want you to realize that the mental load exists in a cycle, the vast majority of it. Let's look at laundry, something that everyone says it's done. Well, when is the cycle done? Because people wear clothes, they put them in a basket or leave them on the floor. Then you have to wash them. Then you have to dry them. Then you have to put them away and then they get worn.

Same goes with food. So food is in the fridge and then it is cooked and then it is eaten and then you have to shop again and then you have to cook again. Dishwashers the same. You empty it, you use the plates, you put them back in. And we seem to think that success is lining up all of these cyclical patterns at one supposed point that we think is done. And I tell you that laundry basket, the moment you think you're on top of the washing and you've put it all away. 

Jo (12:03.01)

You look in a basket somewhere and a kid's decided to clean their room. And suddenly the basket's full. You think I've just spent my entire weekend watching because a child uncovers all these dirty clothes they hadn't given to you before. Can you tell? Been there, done that. So understanding that it is not your job to line them up. And you, when you see this as a cycle, it gives you so much more freedom to just say, you know what, cycle's done for today.

That's where the laundry is in its cycle and it's in multiple places at once. Great. I'm now going to go and do something for me because these things are cycles. This is why we can never ever get on top of them. And we continually chase our tail. Once you understand that it's a cycle, very important that you learn to drop what's not yours. When you outsource, when you delegate a task, ensuring that you delegate the entirety of that task is the key.

So let's say you've asked somebody in your household, maybe you have a partner to help you, let's say, organize a birthday party. Well, then you hand over everything. You say the party's on this date, you're responsible for the present. You don't then think about the present. You don't then ask them 50 times if you got the present. You make it very clear that your job is to buy the present. And then if that kid turns up to the party without a present, the kid will not forget, especially when they're on the way there. It is then that person's responsibility to clear up after themselves and to deal with the disappointment of said child who doesn't have a present.

And I promise you that kid will not let that parent forget that time that you forgot my party present. They have to learn to suffer the consequences of their actions. You cannot pick up the pieces for them and you cannot rescue them. Now, of course, our brain says, yeah, but then I'm going to be the one who has to rush out to Cayman at Midnan. No, why do you have to rescue and pick up the pieces for everyone? That's not how it has to work.

So ensure that you are being very clear in your communication. You're very clear in your expectations and you're able to pass that off and put it down. It's not yours to carry. And another tip, let's say that can be a huge difference is let done be good enough. The kitchen bench doesn't always have to be perfect. The linen cupboard doesn't always have to have the towels folded in the right direction.

Jo (14:29.378)

The amount of people I know that will outsource say putting the towels away in the cupboard to a child and then open it and see that the child hasn't folded them in the right way or they're not in the right piles or they are not folded with the edges one particular way. Leave it. It's in the cupboard. It's done. It's fine. Walk away.

If you can't walk away from a task that someone else has done because it's not done to your standard, then your perfectionist is running the show way, way, way more than you realise, and you need to get that baby under control because it is running your life. Learning to drop things and either delegate them or put them down is one of the hardest things for us to do. Doing more is really, really easy. Doing less, not so much. So I have developed a specific audio guide for you, which I'll put the link in this episode called the Drop List.

It tells you exactly how to drop three things in 10 minutes with no guilt and pick up one thing for you. So the mental load is not a personal failing. This is a systemic trap. I do not want your career to have to die on the altar of the mental load. You can change it today.