Ep 235 Is your Mental Load Weighing You Down?
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[00:00:00] Welcome to the bold goal crusher podcast for anyone looking to stop letting life get in the way and start crushing bold goals. I'm your host, Sara Mayer, and I'm thrilled to navigate this journey with you because it's time to start boldly achieving without working double time. So let's dive in.
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Sara Mayer: Hello bold gold crushers. Today we're going to talk about mental load. And for many of you, you carry a big heavy mental load. But for those of you who aren't familiar with the term mental load, let me break it down for you. So mental load are all the things that you carry in your [00:01:00] head That go along with tasks.
Sara Mayer: For example, if you have kids and you need to take them to soccer, one of the responsibilities is taking them to soccer, but there's a huge mental load with that. There's Jimmy needs his tennis shoes. Jimmy needs his tennis shoe laces put back in after we wash them. They need to be in a bag. He needs his bat.
Sara Mayer: He needs his ball. He needs his whatever for whatever activity they're doing. And they're all the things, all the steps that go into just taking a kid to an activity after school. So mental load is really not about all the activities that we have to do, or all the tasks, the bigger tasks we have to do.
Sara Mayer: It's everything that's involved with it that we then have to remember for example. When doing laundry, I need to use this type of soap on certain fabrics. I need to not use fabric [00:02:00] softener on others. And so those are all the things that end up in our mental load. And I'm sorry, but data shows that women tend to carry more of the mental load, not only at work, but at home and.
Sara Mayer: I want to advocate for a change in that. So first off, how do you reduce mental load personally? So if you're not even dealing with somebody else, like a spouse or a partner or a coworker, how can you reduce your own mental load? There's a couple of steps for that. So the 1st thing is, whether you're running a business or you're just out there, on Thriving, trying to stay alive in your household, or maybe you're working a nine to five to career.
Sara Mayer: It's really important to come up with standard operating procedures and processes for everything that you do. I don't know about you, but when I haven't done something in a long time, I often forget how to get started doing that. And I spend a lot of time [00:03:00] retrying to figure it out. So I do use a sauna, which is a project management software.
Sara Mayer: Think about it as a robust task list. I use it for my business, but I also use it for myself personally. And there are things that I do every month that yes, now I could probably do without a written description, but it helps to reduce my mental load. When I write it down, so in a sauna on the top, there's like a description of what I'm doing.
Sara Mayer: For example, the task may be, plan X, Y, Z party that I plan every year. And what I do is in the description, I make a list of all the things that I need to do to plan that party. And it could be like, I need to do the invitations and format the address list in order to do that. And there's a lot of things I have to remember about the address list.
Sara Mayer: It's a little quirky. Sometimes I need to update it all that stuff. And I try and put all that stuff in the description. I'll even go on zoom like [00:04:00] this with a screen share and a screen share myself doing it for the next year so that I am able to ensure that I can remember the critical steps to get that task done.
Sara Mayer: And so that's a great way that you can reduce your mental load for yourself. Simply the act of typing it up or writing it down will actually commit it to memory and you will be able to remember it more quickly. And then of course, there's that video there if you do forget, so try that, try recording videos for yourself and documenting the steps.
Sara Mayer: I do that for almost everything in my business, even if it's something we do over and over again, because I want to make sure That when I go to do it the next time, the time from start to finish includes very little searching for things, researching things, looking things up, or trying to remember what the heck I need to do this.
Sara Mayer: And it also helps me to get started more quickly. If I know the steps are there, I know that I'm going to [00:05:00] be able to get it done more quickly. I'm more likely to get started on it. If I dread it, or think that it's something that's going to take me a long time. I'm not really sure where to get started.
Sara Mayer: I'll tend to procrastinate. Now, if you're running a business or you're working in a company where you have coworkers, I encourage you to do this for everything you do, even the smallest of tasks. Every year. I send out birthday cards and I actually prep these cards. I don't write them. I handwrite them every month, but I prep these cards a year in advance.
Sara Mayer: So I get the envelopes ready. I get the address labels ready. I figure out who I'm going to mail to, and then I put them in groups. And this is the thing that I only do once a year, prepare that for the entire year. And so this is something that I have documented and written down. So I encourage you to do that at work.
Sara Mayer: If you have a partner, spouse, or co worker, I think it's important to talk through the mental load. [00:06:00] Often people carry a very high mental load and then there's frustration that builds up because you have to remember everything or you have to do everything. And someone may make a comment like all you have to do is take the kid to soccer.
Sara Mayer: But remember, there's things that you need to do that involve that. And so there's a lot of things that you have to remember in order to successfully complete that task. And really talking through with a partner spouse coworker, what's all involved in doing that activity. Not it does 2 things. 1, it allows them to have some empathy and understanding for what you're doing and maybe decide to take that off your list.
Sara Mayer: But 2, it allows you to talk through what are the actual steps of doing X, Y, Z activity and. Are those the most logical steps? Are those the steps that really need to occur? Are there steps that can be taken out or streamlined where somebody can help with so that it makes it easier on you [00:07:00] who's actually implementing the task?
Sara Mayer: So I encourage you to document everything you're doing to have those conversations about what is actually involved with the things that you're responsible for and then talk through, are there better ways that I can do this? We're never going to get rid of everything on our mental load, but we can reduce that mental load by taking some action to ensure that we know how to do it, get started early, and then have some awareness and empathy around the things that we just simply cannot eliminate or streamline.
Sara Mayer: All right, bold goal crushers, it's time to crush your goals and everything that gets in the way because you do not need to work double time. So let's get to it.
