If your brain feels like a laptop with 47 tabs open - need milk, need to check in on sis, remember to book annual leave, don’t forget to post that letter - you’re not alone. Mental load has quietly become one of the biggest contributors to stress, overwhelm and that feeling of being permanently switched on.
It’s the invisible weight that keeps your mind busy even when you’re physically still. And most of us don’t notice how heavy it is until we’re completely wiped out.
So, let’s break it down: what is mental load, why does it build up, and how do we lighten it before it becomes too much?
What Is Mental Load?
Think of mental load as the ongoing checklist running in the background of your mind. It’s the remembering, planning, organising, anticipating, and checking that life relies on. It’s the doing and the thinking about the doing. It’s normally broken into three types:
- Cognitive Load All the thinking, planning, organising and decision-making. Meals for the week, remembering to book the MOT, planning that work presentation, replying to your messages.
- Emotional Load The feelings you manage, yours and sometimes others. Navigating your partner’s tough week, worrying about how your child is settling at school, supporting coworkers under pressure.
- Moral Load The responsibility you feel to “do the right thing”. Making healthy choices, being a good friend, keeping up with birthdays.
When all three build up? Your brain feels like it’s running a marathon in wellies.
The Science of Mental Load: What’s Actually Happening in Your Brain
Your brain is brilliant, but it has limits, especially when it comes to juggling too many invisible tasks at once. We’re not actually able to multitask - we just shift very quickly between tasks. So adding in our mental load to our task-shuffling can make our brains feel like mush.
- Your Working Memory Has a Capacity Psychologists describe working memory as the mental “notepad” where we hold short-term information. But it can only store a handful of items at once. When your mental load is too high, your notepad overflows. That’s why you forget simple things like where you put your keys or what you walked into the room for.
- Cognitive Switching Burns Energy Every time you jump between tasks (“must send that email… oh, must buy milk… wait, need to text my sister back”), your brain burns energy. This is called attention residue - part of your mind stays stuck on the last task, so you never fully feel present.
- Screens Make It Worse Notifications, messages, tabs, reminders - they all compete for your brain’s attention. Your mind never gets to idle. And idling and being bored, funnily enough, is essential for focus, creativity, and clarity.
- Stress Hormones Add to the Noise A constantly busy mind increases cortisol levels.
Studies show sustained stress disrupts sleep, memory, and emotional regulation — which then increases mental load even more. It becomes a loop: overwhelmed = stressed = less capable = more overwhelmed.
Why Mental Load Feels Like It’s Getting Worse
Life hasn’t actually got busier, but our minds have. We’re more digitally connected than ever. With hybrid work, group chats and endless notifications, our mental admin has multiplied. We hold more information than our parents did - social media and constant communication means our brains are juggling more inputs per day than any previous generation.
We also have more choice. What to eat, what to watch, which route to walk, what supplements you ‘need. There is so much information and so many more products available that we have choice-overload which causes decision fatigue and this drains our mental energy.
Unfortunately, in many households, one person ends up carrying more of the invisible planning and mental admin. Research does show this is still more often women. When there is one person who holds more mental load than another, it can also cause a strain on relationships.
How to Lighten Your Mental Load
You can’t eliminate mental load (it’s part of being human), but you can reduce it dramatically with a few hacks.
1. Externalise Your Brain - Write It Down
Don’t store tasks in your head. Write everything down, in a notes app, a planner, or on a cork board. This is organisational, but also neurological. When your brain knows something is written down, it stops holding it in short-term storage.
2. Try the “One Home for Everything” Method
Choose one central place for your essentials: your keys, your charger, your bag, your headphones. Habitually leave things in their “home” and that’ll save your brain a dozen little decisions and thoughts.
3. Reduce Decision Fatigue
Create simple routines and plan ahead to avoid making more decisions day by day. For example, plan your meals for the week and create outfit formulas to help ease each decision. Here are a few tips to reduce decision fatigue.
4. Share the Load (Properly)
If you live with a partner, have a weekly check in to ease some of the to-dos. Look at tasks ahead and divide them based on responsibility. If you carry the extra weight, ask for help on a few tasks and give a deadline. That means you don’t have to keep giving reminders which doesn’t actually remove it from your mental load.
5. Create Mini Digital Boundaries
By removing distraction and comparison, you can save your brain power. Turn off non-essential notifications, put your phone in another room while you eat, don’t take your phone to bed with you. Here are 5 hacks (that actually work) to reduce screen time.
6. Spend Time in Nature
A walk in nature can clear a busy mind. Studies show nature restores depleted executive function, improves working memory and reduces mental chatter.
7. Take 3 Days Offline
For a full reset, a 3 day digital detox is always a good idea. When you step away from your phone and into nature, something magical and biological happens: your attention system gets to rest, your cortisol levels drop, your working memory repairs. Your brain stops anticipating notifications and your mind shifts from planning to presence. That’s why people return from a 3-day Unplugged stay saying things like: “I didn’t realise how loud my brain was until it finally went quiet.”
Reminder: Your Brain Isn’t Meant to Carry Everything
Mental load is normal, but it can get overly heavy if you don’t share or manage it. You brain has limits the same as your muscles. Awareness, some simple shifts, and a whole lot of kindness toward yourself, you can create more space in your mind.
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