The Mental Load of Motherhood: Why So Many Moms Feel Burned Out
Motherhood comes with a strange expectation that you should be able to do an enormous amount of work without looking like it is an enormous amount of work. You’re supposed to be present with your kids, keep track of what they need, maintain your relationships, stay on top of work, keep the house functioning, feed everyone reasonably well, remember appointments, make holidays special, maintain friendships, take care of your health, and somehow find time for yourself in there too.
If you’re overwhelmed by all of that, there is no shortage of advice about what you should do differently: meal prep, exercise, meditate, get more sleep, make time for date nights, be more present, practice self-care. Those things can be helpful, but sometimes the problem isn’t that you haven’t figured out how to manage your life well enough. The mental load of motherhood can be enormous, and sometimes you are simply carrying too much, including a lot of work that nobody else can see.
The mental load of motherhood is often invisible
When we think about the work involved in caring for a family, we tend to think about the things we can actually see: making dinner, doing laundry, driving kids to school, cleaning the house. But there is another layer of work happening behind almost every one of those tasks. Someone realizes the kids are about to outgrow their shoes, remembers when the school forms are due, keeps track of the birthday party this weekend, notices you’re almost out of toothpaste, schedules the pediatrician appointment, figures out what everyone is eating this week, and remembers that the spirit week email you skimmed three days ago means someone needs to wear pajamas to school tomorrow.
That process of noticing, anticipating, planning, remembering, and following up is often referred to as the mental load or cognitive household labor. Research suggests that mothers continue to carry a disproportionate amount of this work. In one study of 322 mothers of young children, mothers reported being responsible for about 73% of the cognitive household labor compared with about 64% of the physical household labor. Greater responsibility for the cognitive work was also associated with higher stress and burnout and poorer mental health and relationship functioning.
This distinction matters because a household can look relatively equal from the outside while still feeling very unequal to the person carrying most of the mental load. Your partner might make dinner, for example, while you are still the person who noticed you needed groceries, planned the meals, bought the ingredients, remembered what the kids would actually eat, and figured out that dinner needed to happen early because someone has practice. The physical task was shared, but the responsibility for making sure the task happened still lived in your brain.
This is also why “Just tell me what you need me to do” can sometimes feel more frustrating than helpful. If you have to notice the problem, figure out what needs to happen, decide who should do it, communicate that, and remember to follow up, you are still managing the task. You’re just no longer the person physically completing it.
The impossible expectations of modern motherhood
The mental load isn’t the only thing moms are carrying. There are also a remarkable number of expectations about what being a “good mom” is supposed to look like, and many of them contradict each other. Be involved with your kids, but don’t hover. Encourage them, but don’t pressure them. Have a career and an identity outside of motherhood, but don’t let your children feel like work comes first. Take care of yourself, but don’t take too much time away from your family. Feed them nutritious food without being overly controlling about food. Set boundaries around screens while also answering your work emails and getting dinner on the table. Make childhood magical, but on a budget. And through all of it, remember to enjoy every minute because they’re only little once.
There isn’t really a way to win. The standard moves constantly, and now social media gives us access to an endless stream of people who appear to be "doing it all." You can always find someone making better lunches, creating better birthday traditions, keeping a cleaner house, exercising more consistently, being more patient, or apparently getting their children to eat vegetables without threatening anyone.
For moms who were already prone to anxiety, perfectionism, people-pleasing, or over-functioning before having children, those expectations can land especially hard. If you learned early that being helpful, responsible, successful, or not needing much from others made you valuable, motherhood provides endless opportunities to keep proving it. There is always someone who needs something, something you could be doing, and some way you could convince yourself that you should be doing it better. This is something I see frequently in my work with moms experiencing anxiety, burnout, and overwhelm. Sometimes motherhood doesn’t create the pattern so much as turn the volume way up on something that was already there.
What if the answer isn’t doing motherhood better?
Most burned-out moms I meet are not struggling because they need to become more efficient. In fact, they’re usually incredibly efficient. They know how to juggle schedules, solve problems, anticipate needs, and get an unbelievable amount done. Becoming even better at those things is probably not the solution.
A much harder question is: What would happen if you carried less?
That question tends to bring up more than household logistics. If you’re used to being the person who handles things, choosing yourself can feel selfish. Asking someone else to take responsibility can be uncomfortable, particularly when they don’t do something the way you would. Saying no can bring up guilt. Watching someone you love struggle with something you could easily fix can create a nearly irresistible urge to step in. You might know intellectually that you deserve rest and still find yourself cleaning the kitchen while everyone else is sitting down.
This is where the mental load starts to overlap with the work I do around anxiety, burnout, and chronic stress. Sometimes there is a very real practical imbalance that needs to change. Sometimes there is an internal pattern that makes it difficult to let other people carry things. Often, both are true at the same time. Therapy can help you tell the difference.
Choosing yourself is not the same as choosing yourself over your family
I think we sometimes talk about self-care in a way that accidentally turns it into another job for mothers. Now, in addition to everything else, you should apparently meditate, exercise, journal, drink enough water, maintain friendships, have a hobby, get eight hours of sleep, and develop an elaborate skincare routine.
That isn’t what I mean when I talk about making room for yourself.
Choosing yourself can be much less glamorous. It might mean acknowledging that you are tired before you reach the point of resentment. It might mean saying no to something you technically could do because you don’t actually have the capacity for it. It might mean letting another adult fully own a responsibility instead of delegating the task while continuing to manage it from the background. It might mean making a decision someone else doesn’t love and allowing them to be disappointed without immediately trying to fix how they feel.
Most importantly, choosing yourself doesn’t mean choosing yourself instead of your family. It means accepting that you are one of the people in your family whose needs matter.
There is value in children seeing that their mom is a whole person. They can see you rest, have boundaries, maintain friendships, enjoy things that have nothing to do with them, and sometimes say, “I can’t do that right now.” A healthy family system does not require one person to chronically overextend herself in order to keep everyone else comfortable. You don’t have to model self-sacrifice in order to model love.
Where do you even start?
If you have been operating this way for years, “prioritize yourself” is not particularly useful advice. You probably already know you should take care of yourself. The harder part is figuring out what that looks like when your brain automatically orients toward everybody else.
One place to start is simply noticing how often your brain volunteers you. Pay attention to the moments when something needs to be done, someone is uncomfortable, or something isn’t going quite right and your immediate response is I should handle that. Before you do, ask yourself whether it is actually yours to handle. Not whether you can handle it—you probably can. Ask whether you need to.
You can also choose one responsibility to stop carrying completely. If another adult takes over soccer, for example, that doesn’t only mean driving to practice. It means checking the schedule, reading the emails, remembering picture day, washing the uniform, and knowing when practice changes. If they’re taking it over, you shouldn’t still have to keep track of it.
And sometimes choosing yourself starts even smaller than that. Ask yourself what you need before automatically asking what everyone else needs. Let someone be mildly disappointed with you. Do something enjoyable that has no productive purpose. Leave something unfinished and notice what comes up. These are small choices, but if you have spent years automatically orienting toward other people, they can feel surprisingly significant.
You are allowed to exist inside your own life
You can love being a mom and still feel overwhelmed by motherhood. You can be deeply grateful for your family and still resent how much you carry. You can have a supportive partner and still realize that too much of the invisible work lives in your head. You can want to be present for your children without making yourself endlessly available to them. Those things can all be true at the same time.
Sometimes therapy is where we begin untangling this—not by finding ways for you to tolerate carrying more, but by getting curious about why you’ve become responsible for so much in the first place. We might look at anxiety and perfectionism, the roles you learned in your family growing up, guilt around boundaries, or the ways you automatically anticipate and manage other people’s needs. We can also get practical about what you want motherhood to look like and where you fit into that picture.
Taking care of your family shouldn’t require constantly putting yourself last.
If you’re a mom who feels exhausted from carrying the mental load, managing everyone else’s needs, or always being the person who holds everything together, I offer Therapy for Moms and Therapy for Anxiety, Burnout & Chronic Stress through my practice in Granada Hills. I provide online therapy throughout Los Angeles and California for anxiety, burnout, perfectionism, people-pleasing, trauma, and the patterns that can make it difficult to make room for yourself.
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