You're listening to Life Kit from NPR.

Hey, it's Mariel.

So the knob on one of my kitchen cabinets fell off the other day.

I was putting away the dishes.

And I did try to screw it back on, but it wasn't working.

I was going to need to take out the tools, and I did not have the energy for that.

Also, I'm going to be honest, I didn't even take the screw out. So here we are, days later,

and every time I open the cabinet, I forget and I get poked in the hand by the pointy end of a screw.

Why does it feel like there's so much we have to do just to stay alive and be reasonably

comfortable? Also, these tasks, they always make themselves known to me at the least

convenient times. Like I go to wash my hands and wouldn't you know it, the soap dispenser's

empty. These tasks fall under the category of the mental load, which is basically the weight

of all the things you need to do,

or think you need to do, to stay alive, maintain a household, and take care of your loved ones.

The load feels heavy, and it often feels emotional, like it's deeper than the soap or the screw

or the carton of milk that you just noticed is almost empty.

We start to go, oh, I need to remember the milk because if I don't, my child will be hungry in the morning. If they're hungry in the morning, they'll show up at school and they won't have enough energy because they will not have had breakfast. And then if they don't have enough energy, they might not actually do as well in their test. Now, if your brain

starts to do this kind of like from A to B to C to disaster, this is in part because this is

emotional thinking work. This is Leah Rappaner, a sociologist at the University of Melbourne

who studies this concept of the mental load. She says one tip is just to start to notice these moments and specifically how weighty a certain task feels. How can we see it? Because once we see it, we can't unsee it. And once we see it, we can start to address it. Leah has a new book out called Drained. Reduce your mental load to do less and be more. It offers research-backed tools to help identify where your energy is going

and how you might spend it better. Now, research shows that women and mothers tend to carry

most of the mental load in their households, and they're feeling burnt out because of it. It does

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