Changing the system: balancing the mental load

In this post Sam O’Neill shares his journey with understanding the problem of mental load and why he’s building an app to help people create balance in their households.

My background is in stay-at-home-dadding. Shortly before my first child was born, I was a designer working for a newspaper and my partner was working for a tech company. We decided it would be best for our situation if she returned to work after (a very short) maternity leave and I went freelance to work flexibly around looking after our daughter. A younger, more naïve me thought it would be possible to work and look after a baby simultaneously (yes, laugh it up).

The cold, hard reality of domestic life swiftly ironed flat any notion I had of dividing my time evenly between finding work, doing work, cleaning the house, and looking after a four-month-old. Luckily we were able to arrange for both my mother and my partner’s to take care of our daughter a day each per week. But with these new arrangements came logistics and planning, and this was mounted on top of all the new thinking I was already barely keeping on top of. I’m ashamed to say that this was probably my first experience with the mental load and I was struggling.

Four years on and my experiences have taught me that I was only just scratching the surface of what most people – including my partner at the time – endure with their overburdened mental loads.

The problem of mental load

The mental load has always been a problem faced by many households, often with one person being overly burdened with domestic project management to the detriment of their wellbeing. But the problem has grown exponentially in the current climate as many of us spend more time at home juggling childcare, domesticity, and work. 

The issue of unevenly distributed invisible labour within the home is tied to wellbeing, satisfaction with life, feelings of emptiness, and burnout. It also increases economic inequality as it disproportionately affects women. Finding ways to balance this load will provide benefits to people’s wellbeing and relationships during the current state of lockdown and beyond. 

Since becoming parents, my partner and I have invested a lot of energy in trying to avoid this imbalance ourselves and try our best to ensure we take equal responsibility for work, house-keeping and childcare. 

We have tried many different ways of communicating and distributing responsibility of the often invisible but highly valuable work that it takes to run a household. During one of our most challenging points, we were both self-employed and juggling childcare for a toddler and a baby and finding things incredibly difficult, my partner had an idea: create a product for freelance parents to manage their time, whether that be work-, domestic-, or child-related.

A new tool

As the idea took shape, I realised that the scope of the project could be wider: we could create a tool that would help solve a recurring problem in our lives and the lives of many others.

We’re launching Balance the Load to help anyone who might be struggling with an unrecognised invisible workload to unearth the value of their contribution and open up the dialogue for how to rebalance the work and thought that each person contributes to their household. 

We are working rapidly to launch this tool earlier than planned because we believe that this current crisis has opened people’s eyes to many of the problems in our households and wider society that have been glossed over or ignored for so long. We believe that now is the time for people to shift the balance and create a more equal society. 

Alongside our tool we are also developing resources to empower people to have more effective conversations in their relationships and to solve the problem of the mental load together. If you would like to contribute, please get in touch. And if you would like to be the first to know when our app is ready, sign up to our newsletter. 

Sam, founder of Balance the Load, is a Nottingham-based web designer and father of two.

If you would like to contribute to our series about Changing the System then please get in touch with tessa@collaborativefuture.co.uk. And if you’d like to support us to keep doing our work please share our posts, sign up to our newsletter or buy us a virtual coffee.