Society. Mental load: the weight of everything no one sees

It is 10 p.m. The day is over, in theory. Yet the list keeps scrolling in your head: the permission slip for the school trip, the bill to pay before Friday, the cat's vaccination, Sunday lunch. None of it is very heavy on its own. What wears you down is the accumulation, and above all being the only one who thinks about it.

That is exactly what “mental load” means: not doing things, but having to anticipate, organise and remember them all the time. A form of work that cannot be seen, that never really stops, and that appears in no job description.

A term from sociology

The expression was not born on social media. As early as 1984, the French sociologist Monique Haicault described, in an article that became a reference, the “ordinary management of life in two” carried out by working women: keeping the household in mind even at work. More than thirty years later, in 2017, the comic “Fallait demander” (“You should have asked”) by the illustrator Emma brought the term to a wide audience and triggered a wave of testimonies.

The figures confirm the imbalance. According to the last major time-use survey by INSEE, the French statistics institute, carried out in 2010, the gap between women and men in household tasks had narrowed but was still about an hour and a half a day. And these surveys measure time spent doing, not time spent thinking, organising and planning.

Mental load is not doing things: it is being the only person who has to think about them.

When your mind never switches off

Over time, fatigue sets in: less restful sleep, irritability, the feeling of never being “on top of things”. In couples, mental load often fuels silent tensions made of reproaches that are never voiced. For parents, it can contribute to real exhaustion, sometimes called parental burnout.

Guilt joins in: many people blame themselves for being “badly organised”, when the problem is not organisation but how the load is shared.

What can be understood in therapy

Why is it sometimes so hard to let go, even when the other person offers to help? In consultation, the question often opens onto each person's history: the family models we inherited, the place we learned to occupy, the need to be indispensable, or the fear that things will be “done wrong” if we do not control them. Putting words to these mechanisms often helps find a way out.

This article is for information only. It replaces neither a consultation nor a diagnosis, which is a doctor's role.