“The Mental Load” has become a trendy topic recently. Author, speaker and psychotherapist Morgan Cutlip, Ph.D., creator of My Love Thinks, unpacks the term and explains how couples can learn to work together to shoulder the physical and emotional responsibilities of today’s family.

The mental load, sometimes referred to as invisible or emotional labor, is the weight of responsibilities someone, usually the wife and mother, manages for those who depend on her in life, home, work and relationships. Morgan’s no stranger to this tension, as she’s a wife, entrepreneur and home-schooling mom of two elementary age children whose husband travels for work.

“I feel like I live everything I talk about. I try to work around the kids, but sometimes my days get hijacked,” Morgan said. “We struggle how to divide up the responsibilities of the home in a way that feels fair. It’s not about griping, placing blame, pointing fingers or criticizing, it’s about tackling the problem together. Otherwise, you start to build resentments, which affects how you meet each other’s needs — and even your sex life.”

Everyone has a mental load – it’s an invisible, running to do list people carry in their minds. But for men and women, the mental load looks different. The duties of home and family life tend to be carried by women – even if they also work a full-time job outside of the home – and it affects their outlook.

Morgan breaks the mental load into three domains: physical, emotional and mental. The physical encompasses actual tasks that get done around the house like caring for the lawn, making meals, doing laundry, or washing dishes. The mental sphere involves the thought behind those tasks. What’s on the grocery list? Do we have enough detergent? Does the lawnmower have gas?

The emotional labor of the home is the internal calculation one is constantly evaluating to determine cause-and-effect feedback from members of the family. It requires a deep knowing of each person to anticipate needs and preferences. Will your daughter eat chunky peanut butter? Does your son need time outside to work out his wiggles?

“It never ends, and it follows you everywhere,” Morgan said. Even women working a full-time job can get whiplashed right back in by a text or phone call. And the emotional domain is very difficult to outsource. You can’t just turn off your child’s emotional needs.

The point where the mental, physical and emotional realms intersect is the triple threat of burden, she added. And most tasks in home and family life do encompass all three components. “That’s why they are so exhausting,” Morgan said. “It’s much more involved than a husband offering to swing by the store. Even making the grocery list requires thought about who has allergies, who’s going to eat what… we see the manifestation of the physical outcome but don’t understand all it took to get there.

“The mental load takes up cognitive real estate,” she added. “When you become really overwhelmed, you might become more forgetful or snappy. It can even crowd out your ability to get in the mood for sex.”

In her latest book, The Better Share, releasing in April 2025, Morgan explains insights she’s found surveying and interviewing more than 530 women and men. While she recognizes the majority of those who purchase the book will be female, The Better Share is not written in a way that will make a husband bristle. Her goal is to help couples find a better way to navigate the mental load and approach it as a team. Our actual enemy is not our partner, she added, and it’s not just that a husband is “not doing enough.” The pace of life, busy workload, cost of living, demands of the modern schedule and the pressure to feel productive all add to what’s on the plate. The Better Share offers practical tools and takeaways to help people understand how they can offload emotional burdens.

“It’s not about 50/50,” she said. “It’s about what feels fair. When you feel like something is unfair, that’s when you feel the injustice in the relationship and resentment builds. Fair is a moving target. Couples have to figure out what feels good to them. It’s not just re-dividing up the tasks of life.”

One component she’s found that helps the person doing the emotional heavy lifting — appreciation. “So much of the work of the home feels invisible – the toilet paper just shows up!” she said. “Something as simple as feeling like our partner sees it, gets it and values what we are doing goes a long way toward easing the mental load, whether or not the responsibility for a physical task is relieved.

“Show some appreciation, and right there you will move the needle,” she added. Another key takeaway gives the one carrying the mental load permission to ask their partner for more participation. She encourages spouses to take more initiative to increase their knowledge of the home and family life. You can’t relieve an emotional burden if you don’t know what it is. A high level of knowing allows you to take care of the emotional needs of the family.

Morgan recounted a somewhat humorous situation in her own family when her husband unwittingly used adult peppermint soap to bathe their young son. Morgan was alerted to the distress by her son’s howls when he found the contact abrasive to his sensitive young skin.

“Part of it is lack of knowledge,” she said. While many partners are passively willing to be helpful, Morgan encourages their becoming active initiators. She also addresses ways to build a bridge to one who may be reluctant.

The mental load involves much more than parenting concerns. The way moms experience motherhood is dependent on the quality of their partnership, she found.

Morgan recorded an audio course on Spark that includes 10 separate exercises for couples. Men and women can listen to their own version at a time convenient to them and then come together and talk about the episode. She created content based on feedback from responses from her social media community like, “My partner gets defensive if I express my needs or talk about the mental load.” Or, “I’m the one investing the time and energy, and I don’t feel like he’s doing the same.” Morgan personally answers online chats and registers common complaints so she can serve these relationships in a way that addresses pain points and offers solutions.

“The course is convenient, targeted, moves the needle, and doesn’t take a lot of time or cause arguments,” she said. One topic describes how a spouse might have developed a bad attitude toward his/her partner and includes an exercise that helps change their perspective.

Morgan also offers a mini course on the mental load on Paired, the number one app for couples. People can listen individually then engage in conversations in their own space. Because the mental load may be the cause of recurring relationship issues, Morgan has developed an online course, The Mother Load, for those who are interested in a more in-depth approach.

Content is still brief, as her target is the busy mom with a lot on her plate. The course addresses two areas Morgan describes as The Within, the individual work that each partner will explore to better understand the mental load and behaviors and thoughts that may be sabotaging a more equitable relationship, and the Between, couple work that will dig into how the inequity of the mental load can trickle into other aspects of the relationship and what to do about it.

The Mother Load teaches practical ways to renegotiate responsibilities and support the partner who carries the bulk of the mental load. A dynamic research-based model helps the couple visualize the mental load’s impact on their relationship so they can reconnect and make adjustments in a targeted and efficient manner.

Before she started writing about the mental load, and before she was even a mother, Morgan grew up in the relationship education world as the daughter of venerated therapist and pastor Dr. John Van Epp.

Morgan was in elementary school when her father pursued his doctorate degree and loved tagging along with him to his psychology classes. In fact, decades later when she attended the same university for her doctoral degree, she was surprised to recognize one of the same professors. Whenever she and her father went for a drive, their favorite car game was to discuss hypothetical cases. His concluding question was always the same: “How would you help them?”

“That was my favorite thing,” she said, “creating practical strategies. I grew up with a love for this type of work and solving problems with actionable items.” She remembers accompanying her father when he taught at marriage conferences for 10 years in a row! She worked with him at Love Thinks while she was completing her doctorate degree but knew she wanted to make her own contribution in the field that involved helping women.

She found her niche with her first book, Love Your Kids Without Losing Yourself, as she summarized her experience with her daughter. “Motherhood really smacked me across the face,” she said. “I was not prepared. I felt like I was constantly falling short.”

She describes the book on her website, “You don’t need another list of things to do that you don’t have time for. You love motherhood, but you’re sick of feeling burned out, lost in the shuffle, and like you never come up for air. It’s time you discover a new approach to motherhood that equips you with a practical plan to feel more aligned with the mother you always imagined yourself to be.”

There are many reasons mothers today are struggling with anxiety and overload, issues that bleed out into how women experience that season. The culture has undergone a major shift with more women in the workplace. “Responsibilities have increased, but we haven’t gained more time. Women are the caretakers of all the family relationships, then we throw on a career, and our plate gets too full,” she said.

Morgan mentioned a theory described by Sharon Hays as “intensive mothering,” the societal belief that parents are supposed to invest an inordinate amount of time, energy, and money in raising the children and providing a stimulating environment.

“In a child-centric world, everything revolves around the child,” she said. The information age allows us to have an overwhelming amount of free information at our fingertips. “We think there’s a right answer to everything, but there are natural parts of parenthood we just have to weather,” she said. Mothers also have fewer older, wiser voices to draw from, because people live further away from family and are not as plugged into communities as they once were. These factors lead to higher rates of anxiety and lower levels of life satisfaction.

Morgan’s made it her mission to serve moms in that busy, overwhelmed space – to help them feel empowered with their relationship with themselves and their relationship with their partner. Her catch phrase, “Go mom yourself,” encourages mothers to apply the Relationship Attachment Model (RAM) tools she taught with her father for years to themselves. When a mom is feeling overwhelmed, take a minute for a self-check, she advises. “If we can change the mindset and narrative, we can manage the pieces of life,” Morgan said.

“If you are having a busy day with the kids and feeling like you are going to lose your mind, step into the bathroom for 30 seconds and do a self-check. You can define what is going on internally, then make a shift to manage the relationship with yourself. The more regularly a mom continues this practice, the more she’ll learn to manage herself better.”

Her book brings practical tools moms can use to reconnect with themselves and locate what their needs even are. “We are very disconnected from what we need, because we’ve put our needs on the back burner for so long. We don’t even know what to do when we have that minute alone because we are so depleted.” She teaches moms how to graciously assert themselves in a way that honors them and others.

In addition to her books, courses, audio resources and social media community @DrMorganCutlip, Morgan has created content and courses for @FloTracker, the number one app in health and fitness, and has been a featured relationship expert for Good Morning America, Teen Vogue, The New York Times and Women’s Health.