What if the reason your cognitive load feels so heavy isn't only because you have too much to hold? What if somewhere along the way you became the person who holds it? The one who remembers everything, anticipates stuff, double checks things, notices what everyone else misses, and you have been rewarded handsomely for being that woman. So what happens when you finally want to put some of it down? But your brain has spent decades learning that holding everything is exactly what keeps you successful, valuable, and safe. Cognitive load is a word that is appearing everywhere right now. And personally, I'm quite delighted that we've moved away from the word mental load. The mental load has just become a proxy for women to get angry at how little men help around the house and they're holding everything, the invisible list, the remembering, the anticipating, the noticing across all facets of our life. Now, there are some seasons in life that just genuinely have more in them. I am in one of those seasons. I have teenagers going through the last few years of high school. I have a dad who's got ongoing health challenges and hospital visits and medications. I've got animals, I've got a husband, I've got friendships, I've got a business. We don't want to gaslight women in saying, you know what, some seasons there is just more stuff to manage than others. However, two women carrying the exact same logistics or life circumstances or stuff can experience very different weights around them. Because the cognitive load often isn't just the lists of the tasks themselves. It's all the emotion and the responsibility and the meaning that gets attached to every single item. When you've had decades being the one who notices, the one who catches what everybody else misses, who remembers things about so-and-so's birthday down the road, who lived four streets away from you when you were six. Now, this pattern that we've had, this skill that we have developed, has been so well rewarded. It's got you promotions. You've earned a lot of trust. You stepped up into bigger responsibility before because of it. Let's be real. Feel really good sometimes about to sweep into mess that somebody else caused and do the impossible. There can be a different level of competence and ego and significance you get when you're the one that fixes stuff. There's safety in that because you feel needed, you get recognized sometimes. There's a work version of all this extra load that we're holding. It's our team members' birthdays, it's the details of the things, of checking that meeting's being sent, the double checking, knowing what's falling through the cracks and trying to keep that whole picture in your head. Then the home version we know so well. It's the appointments, the uniforms, who needs to be here when, and what needs to be done before that, and managing your kids' friendships and your friendships and your parents and your logistics and what everyone needs next. It's exhausting. But how we do one thing is how we do everything. And it's very rare for us to be able to relinquish control beautifully at work and then suddenly become, yeah, free easy at home. Our brains are creatures of habit. We have decades of reps. Hypervigilance has become extraordinarily efficient and the dominant pathway for our brain.

There are these things that happen inside our brain called ants. Automatic negative thoughts. And you, my friend, probably have lots of ant invasions. Your ant army has a couple of different divisions, and they tend to have a couple of different dominant thoughts. One of mine used to be, oh my god, what if all goes wrong? That lead ant was shortly followed by the next ant in line, what if it all goes wrong? Oh my gosh, something got missed. There's gonna be a mistake. I should probably double check that. I better make sure that nothing goes wrong. I better not let anybody down. Oh my gosh, if I let them down, they're gonna think I don't know what I'm doing. If I don't know what I'm doing, I'm gonna get fired. If I get fired, I'm gonna have no money. If I don't have any money, lose my house. If I lose my house, I'm gonna be rumbling up. Sounds ridiculous. But believe it or not, you have a pathway just like this one, etched through ant armies right throughout your brain. Your lead ants, you might have three or four, might be a bit different. Maybe it's oh my gosh, I'm not smart enough, or some kind of what if. It doesn't matter what your lead ant is, because each ant is carrying a backpack, and that backpack is usually full of shame, guilt, resentment, a bit more shame, bit more anger, bit more frustration. Note they're called ants. A-N-T-S. They're not the automatic thought isn't, gosh, I nailed that meeting. Wow, I'm so smart. I'm just the best at what I do. Everybody loves me. I'm going to be so successful. Right? It doesn't go that way. And so we have to ensure that we are understanding what are our ants, where are they starting the invasions, and how do we ensure that we bring them under control. So not only do we have our ant army coming in, the ant army starts creating such a path that it becomes part of who we are.

And putting something down is actually going to create more discomfort before it creates relief. And not necessarily because they'll do it wrong, because I can promise you, the amount of women that are like, they can stack the dishwasher, whatever it may be, but sitting underneath that is they won't do it my way. My way has decades of evidence behind it. The standard that you uphold, I guess is it's high, becomes safety. Because then you can't be criticized for doing it wrong, or you can't be told that you made a mistake because you did it exceptionally well. I saw this happen so often in early parenting days. I had this particular friend and her poor husband will go up and try to put the nappy on the newborn. And she'd come back down and go, no, no, no, you did it wrong. It doesn't go on that way. And then he'd try to burt the baby. He's like, No, no, no, you have to do it this way. No, no, no, no. This is the way that we have to wash the clothes, and this is the women, no, no, no, no, no, no. Well, instead of recognizing that somebody else does it differently, all they get is an audit, usually a criticism and a nag. You do that enough times and criticize someone for not doing it right, not doing it fast enough, not doing it properly enough, and everyone learns the rules. Okay, if I do it, I'm corrected. I'm usually made to feel bad and I'm nagged. Often not your intention. I don't do it, I get nagged. Hmm. Couch starts looking pretty darn attractive. We've trained the system around us as much as the system has trained us. The whole, well, I'll just do it now. It can solve today's problem beautifully, but then it just stacks more onto tomorrow's cognitive load. And as part of this learned helplessness, other people stop noticing because you've told them they don't really need to pay attention. You become better often by default, and this starts young at holding. Doing it, picking up the slack. They become worse at holding, which then becomes more and more evidence that only I can do this, only I can get it done. You also then start to make it look easy, never mind the fact that you're like stacking the dishwasher going, nobody helps around here. No one can then see the weight that you're carrying and the weight, the resentment and the bitterness and the internal dialogue of well heading by well happy. And then the help might arrive, usually because you've guilted or shamed them or yelled them into it, but then you can't tolerate the difference of how they've done it. And so you take it. And the loop goes around and around and around.

You might be able to delegate the task, but you still keep that mental ownership, the checking, the auditing, the monitoring. Has it been done right? The task might leave your hands, but it never leaves your brain. Really learning to put it down means you have to tolerate different standards. I know, I know. Please don't shrivel up and die, please. You have to accept that maybe it isn't done on your timelines. Maybe that it's not done perfectly. And there's going to be a great amount of discomfort in not knowing, in not checking, in not refolding the towels after somebody else has put them away, and potentially allowing consequences of if you have delegated somebody to go and pick up a child and they forget to go and pick up a child, well, then they're gonna have to deal with the consequences of it. Now, I'm not saying you have to lower all your standards. God forbid, I would never say that you would throw rocks at me. But all standards really need to be 150%. Not every single ball that you drop is a glass one. And not every different way of doing things is the wrong way.

The question you need to start asking is what am I making it mean if I don't hold this? Because if you have built your entire identity and personality around being useful, around being highly competent, you're responsible, you're a good mother, a good leader, one everyone can rely on. Some things genuinely need carrying in the season you're in. We don't shame that. But some things can be put down. Putting them down is going to require you to tolerate the feeling that arrives when you stop controlling the outcome. The bigger question becomes what are you carrying because it genuinely needs you? And what are you carrying because you've forgotten how not to?

OUTRO: Thanks for joining me today. If this episode resonated, share it with a woman who needs to hear it. And if you want to be part of the Ripple Effect, leaving a review helps it reach the women it's meant for. I'll see you next time.