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Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of IHeart Radio.

Good morning. This is Laura.

Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.

Today's episode is going to be a longer one, part of the series where I interview

fascinating people about how they take their days from great to awesome and any advice they

have for the rest of us. So today I'm delighted to welcome Alison Damager to the Before

Breakfast. She is a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She's also the

author of the brand new book, What's

On Her Mind, which is about the mental load of family life. So, Alison, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Laura. It's great to be with you. Yeah, excited to have you. So why don't

you introduce yourself to our listeners? Absolutely. So as Laura said, I am a sociologist by training and profession, and I study how gender shows up in family life. So most of my work so far has looked at what that means for couples, both different gender and same gender couples. How do they divide up the work that goes into keeping a household running, keeping

children alive and reasonably happy, and with particular focus on the cognitive or mental

aspects of that work. Yeah, how would you define mental load? So I think it's easiest to start

with what it's not.

When we talk about housework, usually what people have in mind is, I'm washing the dishes.

I am cooking a meal.

I am driving someone somewhere.

And what I have tried to show is that we also have to think about what's going on in people's minds. What decisions are they making? What

problems are they troubleshooting? And so I think about cognitive labor as sort of the work

behind the scenes that makes everything else possible. It's scanning the horizon for potential

problems or opportunities or upcoming issues, doing research to figure out how to handle those,

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