A Roadmap to Beating the Mental Load: Unpacking Emotional Labor with Leah Ruppanner

Studies among U.S. men and women have shown remarkable progress toward gender equality at home in recent decades. As women now make up 40 percent of household breadwinners and men spend more time on child care and housework, more couples say they share domestic responsibilities equally. Yet even in egalitarian partnerships, the caregiving burden remains unevenly distributed. Research shows the persistent inequality is not just in the physical labor of caregiving, either: Mothers are more likely to report that parenting is stressful and tiring, and feel more judged by others than fathers do.

In her 2021 article with Liz Dean and Brendan Churchill, sociologist Leah Ruppanner defines this as the “mental load”: the emotional and cognitive labor, or  “emotional thinking work,” required to manage work, life, and family each day.

In her new book, Drained: Reduce Your Mental Load to Do Less and Be More, Ruppanner provides a groundbreaking framework for understanding the mental load. She identifies eight major types:

1. Life organization: staying on top of planning and tasks
2. Emotional support: checking in on family, friends, and coworkers
3. Relationship hygiene: maintaining strong social connections
4. Magic making: carrying on traditions and creating special life moments
5. Dream building: helping others fulfill their passions and ambitions
6. Individual upkeep: keeping fit and healthy
7. Safety: protecting family and loved ones from danger
8. Meta-care: raising children who will thrive in the future

I interviewed Ruppanner, a Fellow at New America’s Better Life Lab, about what her research reveals for reducing the mental load, and why easing it matters for the public good.

In Drained, you talk about sociology as a superpower. What did you notice in your research that led you to focus on the mental load?

I’ve studied unpaid domestic work for 25 years. Men’s contributions have increased over time, and we do have more equality, but it’s not actually equal. Everyone, especially women, feels burned out, overwhelmed, and unhappy. There’s not enough time. How can we have come so far and still feel so overwhelmed? One of the critical pieces I discovered in answering that question is that we haven’t gotten a good handle on the mental load.

We can see the mental load in both big and small ways. For example, you are trying to decide what preschool to send your child to, or you’re wondering if you have enough toilet paper in the house. I don’t know why I’m giving this example. It’s a very odd place to start.

No, it’s very important, because if you run out of toilet paper, the whole household system shuts down. 

Okay, let’s work through this. Cognitive labor would be: Do we have enough? I’ve checked—we don’t. Put it on the list, buy it, done. Sometimes our lives work this way, linearly, A to B to C, and we feel happy.

But in reality, it often goes something like this: Do we have enough toilet paper? Should I buy it in bulk or just a small pack to get us through the week? Can I afford to buy it in bulk right now? Oh my God, should we even be using so much toilet paper? What’s the environmental cost? How many trees have I cut down over the years? If we keep cutting down trees, will global warming keep increasing? If global warming continues, what kind of world will my child have? Will there even be a world for them to inherit? 

This is where cognitive labor meets emotional labor, and they become a mental load. Something as small as monitoring your household can become almost catastrophic, because it’s tied to emotional thinking about the people we love. And this is what makes it so heavy. 

You find the mental load is not just something women carry. Men do too. But your research finds that men aren’t as stressed out by their mental loads as women are. Why is that? 

I think three things are happening. First, men’s mental loads look different from women’s. Men are generally more work-focused. When thinking about parenting, men often consider it in terms of being better caregivers—doing better than their own fathers, being more engaged. That’s a mental drain, but one our society rewards. If the system values work and providing, then spending your mental energy at work aligns with being a good dad and a good employee. For mothers, the expectations clash. They’re told that being a good mother and a good worker means being emotionally available and always present. Work and family don’t align—they compete. That’s an impossible standard.

Second, we’re working with outdated working norms. Workplaces haven’t fully shifted to reflect that most families are dual-earner households, and governments still don’t center caregiving. 

And third, women continue to manage complex care in most households—that is, when you’re caring for more than one person, or someone with high-stakes needs: a child with severe food allergies; an aging or declining parent; or someone with a mental health condition. Their mental loads are especially heavy because the risks are high. Get it wrong, and someone could die. That’s very difficult to turn off. 

Your book includes a mental load audit, designed to help people understand their total mental load, identify which parts they want to keep, and which they don’t. You also write about mental load as a systemic problem that requires systemic solutions. So talk to me about the relationship between the two, and what the roadmap for both individual and social change looks like.

Let me tell you the dream: that people would have a surplus of energy to deal with mental load.

Mental load energy is finite—it’s like a bank account. But many people spend that energy on things they didn’t care about or duplicate it, meaning partners worry about the same issues without better outcomes. That’s wasteful, and often it pulls people further from their goals.

Right now, a lot of people are running their accounts empty every day—holding just enough energy to get by. That’s not sustainable, no way to live, and it harms both mental or physical health.

And if you’re reading this and thinking, “Give me a break, I already have so much on my plate”—ignore everything I just said, you need rest! My research shows many people, especially mothers, can’t truly relax because their energy is constantly being spent—ruminating during a bath, a walk, or a TV show. But rest is not optional. It’s sacred. It’s essential.

But for those who can realign, imagine operating at an energy surplus. My colleague Ana Catalano Weeks found that those with the heaviest mental loads are the least politically engaged—they just don’t have the bandwidth. Even a small shift could change that. That’s what I hope this book will do.

Along those lines, I mentioned before that this research is international. You’ve interviewed people from multiple countries, and you write that by and large, you were surprised how similar the mental load looked. But there were some things about the United States that stood out to you as different. 

One category of mental load I identified was safety—the emotional thinking work people do to ensure the safety of themselves and their family members. Unlike Australians, Americans were very afraid of being shot. And in a follow-up survey of 5,000 people across the U.S., Australia, the UK, and Canada, people of color in the U.S. specifically had mental loads that were exceptionally high on safety. That is a uniquely American finding. Our systems that are set up to oppress and threaten certain groups—people carry that. That is a limit on our humanness. What a loss.

On policy, we do not treat care as a public good in the U.S. We treat care as optional, secondary to productivity. And yet every one of us will both receive and give care. It’s what tethers us to each other. My friend Maria in Sweden has a daughter with a developmental disability. She gets specialized early schooling, transportation, and support. I asked Maria if she felt guilty about having her daughter in child care, [and] she looked at me like, “Guilty?” That guilt is distinctly American, rooted in the idea that mothers are solely responsible for it all, and that if you get it wrong, good luck. Part of the audit is separating what you do out of pressure from social norms, like guilt or judgment, and what you actually value.

You seem like something of a role model yourself in how much of the mental load you’ve said goodbye to. You say, “I won’t participate in my own destruction.” You say you don’t make “magic” at Christmas—you eat lasagna in your swimming pool. But you discovered in your research that some aspects of the mental load people enjoy and want to keep. 

Not everything in the mental load is a burden. Some things we love, I call them “mental loves.” The first step is to sort them: what you have to do, what you love (even if it costs a little), and what actually gets you closer to your goals.

As for my own evolution, I’ve let go of a lot. My house is always a mess, but you’re always welcome to come in. I don’t create magic during the holidays. And what I’ve gotten in return is more love, more connection, and more time to chase my wildest dreams. This book was an idea four years ago. At first, I thought, “Who, me?” But I took it one step at a time. 

I’ll be honest: I just got a breast cancer diagnosis, and that will shift my mental load. But I know where I’m headed. Our ship is pointed toward the dream—it might take a different route, but we’re going.

And none of that would be possible if I’d decided my floors were too sticky to let you in.