Mental load is that invisible slice of everyday life that anticipates and organises everything, yet never shows up on any chore chart. A 2024 study by sociologist Leah Ruppanner, published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, puts at 71% the share of the household's cognitive load that mothers carry alone, in silence.
Why does the brain never truly switch off?
mothers carry an average of 71% of the household's cognitive load
The instinct is to assume that a resting brain simply switches to standby. For a long time that seemed obvious, and it turned out to be wrong. In the early 2000s, neurologist Marcus Raichle of Washington University in St. Louis found that brain activity barely drops when we focus on a task: so what happens off-task isn't a void at all, but an almost continuous hum of activity.
Raichle called this state the default mode (Raichle et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, United States, 2001). This background mode is thought to support autobiographical memory and mind-wandering: the mind's habit of drifting with no instructions at all. Even at rest, the brain keeps on making sense of things.
What does the 71% figure actually tell us?
In 2024, sociologist Leah Ruppanner and her team at the University of Melbourne published a study in the Journal of Marriage and Family that puts a number on something many women live through without being able to name it: mothers carry an average of 71% of the household's cognitive load.
This figure isn't about the tasks you can see, count or divide up on a chart. It measures something else: the invisible share, the part that thinks and organises without ever showing up in a split of chores. As the researchers put it, “this load is unseen and unspoken.”
Why does switching off remain a luxury for so many women?
Holiday time doesn't bring the relief people assume it does. Far from easing the mental load, it tends to swell it instead: the house fills up, meals multiply and guests keep coming. What's imagined as a break becomes, for many women, simply an extension of their usual domestic work.
For women topping up an insufficient wage with cleaning jobs, home-baked cakes sold on the side, or undeclared work, switching off at night doesn't really mean anything: they're simply moving to a different job. In these economies, where a second job and sheer resourcefulness aren't a choice but a condition of survival, putting the phone down has less to do with mental hygiene than with a luxury reserved for those who can actually afford it.
Why is “doing nothing” still a gendered issue?
A brain that looks idle never really is. A demanding mental task only raises its energy use by a few percent above baseline: so most of the work happens elsewhere, in what we assume is empty space. This background activity supports mind-wandering, self-reflection, autobiographical memory and the processing of whatever we've just experienced. Mentally, doing nothing is already doing something.
This silent occupation produces no list and no visible result, so it goes entirely unrecognised, and that is exactly where "doing nothing" becomes a gendered issue. When this invisible load is shared unevenly, one person keeps running the household in their head while the other finally lets their mind wander. Free time doesn't mean the same thing depending on who's living it.
Recognising this load is already the first step toward shifting it: name what weighs before trying to share it out, because you can't split what you refuse to see. Between private life and work, this mental labour carries on in the background, even when your hands are still and the house looks calm. If you're juggling a household and a business, you know this better than anyone: switching off starts with an honest conversation, at home as much as at the office, about what everyone is really carrying in their head.
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