Photo by kaboompics.com

If you’ve spent any time in mom spaces online, you’ve probably encountered the term “mental load.” Maybe you’ve even shared a post about it, felt deeply seen by it, or tried to “make the invisible visible” with your partner using a task list or a card deck.

And that work matters. But here’s what I want to offer you: the mental load conversation, as we’ve been having it, is incomplete. And that incompleteness is actually getting in the way of real relief.

Let me explain.

Why “Mental Load” Doesn’t Quite Cover It

The term mental load implies that what we’re carrying is primarily cognitive — a long to-do list living in our heads. Doctor’s appointments, birthday parties, permission slips, the dishwasher that needs unloading. All the invisible tasks that fall disproportionately on mothers.

Yes. Absolutely. And also — that’s not the whole picture.

Our thoughts don’t exist in a vacuum. They are intimately connected to how we feel and what is happening in our nervous system. Which is exactly why I’ve started using a different term: the brain body load.

This isn’t just a semantic tweak. Getting the name right changes what tools we reach for.

When we frame the load as purely mental, the solutions we look for are organizational: better systems, clearer task division, a shared calendar. And those things can help. But if we stop there, we miss the deeper layer — the emotional and physiological weight that each one of those tasks is carrying.

A doctor’s appointment isn’t just a calendar entry. It’s a whole emotional experience — especially if you carry health anxiety, or if you’re the one who always ends up staying home when a kid gets sick, or if there’s a chronic condition in the mix. The real estate it takes up in your body is entirely different from the real estate a birthday party RSVP takes up. They are not equal. And a task list can’t account for that.

The MOMsight Framework: Understanding Your Full Human Experience

At the School of MOM, I teach something called the MOMsight framework — a map of what it actually means to be a human being moving through the world. MOMsight (a play on insight) tracks the interplay between your nervous system, your body, your emotions, your feelings, your thoughts, and the events and circumstances happening around and within you.

Here’s the high-level picture: events happen all the time, both outside us and inside us. In response to those events, we have thoughts — upward of 50,000 a day. Those thoughts contribute to emotions, which are biochemical processes happening in our bodies. We all have them — researcher Brené Brown identifies 87 distinct human emotions, and Marc Brackett’s Mood Meter maps a hundred across a spectrum of energy and pleasantness.

Emotions are universal. But feelings — the way we each subjectively experience those emotions — are individual. Anxiety, for example, might show up in your gut. For someone else, it’s a flushed face or clenched fists. Same emotion, different felt experience.

And here’s what makes this so relevant to the brain body load: 90 to 95% of all of this is unconscious. The thoughts, the emotional responses, the choices we make — most of it is happening below our level of awareness, driven by the programming that lives in our nervous system.

This means that when your child spikes a fever and you feel your chest tighten, or when you notice frustration rising toward your partner before you’ve even said a word — that’s not irrational. That’s your nervous system running its programming. And no amount of task redistribution is going to touch that.

Why the Blame Loop Keeps Us Stuck

One of the things I notice when the mental load comes up — in conversations, in online spaces, in my groups — is that it tends to activate a very particular emotional response. Women contract. They go into frustration, resentment, sometimes shutdown. And while that frustration is completely valid and often accurately placed, it’s usually not moving the needle.

Venting has its place. Community, witnessing, being seen in your struggle — that matters deeply. But staying in the blame loop keeps us focused outward when the work that creates the most relief happens inward.

And here’s something worth sitting with: research shows that men and women can walk into the same cluttered room and have genuinely different physiological responses. That’s not an excuse for inequity — it’s biology. And when we understand that, we can start to work with the actual texture of what’s happening rather than just the surface of it.

What It Actually Takes to Lighten the Load

Offloading the brain body load isn’t just about moving tasks around. It’s about shifting what’s happening at a root level — in your nervous system, in your body, in the unconscious programming that’s been running quietly in the background since long before you became a mother.

That kind of shift takes awareness first. You can’t change what you can’t see. And it takes practice — not just information. The School of MOM exists because so many of us feel like we missed this foundational education in what it means to be a human who can actually flourish. Not just cope. Not just manage. Flourish.

If the mental load conversation has felt heavy or circular for you, this is the invitation to go a layer deeper. To name what you’re actually carrying — not just cognitively, but somatically, emotionally, relationally. And to start working with it there.

Because real relief isn’t found in a better task list. It’s found in your body.