🧠 Ever feel like your brain has 37 tabs open—and none of them are loading properly?
That, friend, is mental load.
It’s the invisible to-do list we carry around all day. Not just the tasks, but the tracking of those tasks. The emotional bandwidth of remembering, coordinating, managing, predicting, rescheduling, and recovering. Mental load isn’t just doing the thing—it’s being the one who keeps everyone else doing their things, too.
And here’s what makes it extra exhausting: you can’t always point to it. You just feel heavy, irritable, snappy, or stuck. You wonder, “Why am I so tired? I didn’t even do that much.” But your brain? It’s been running a marathon in the background all day.
💥 Identifying the Pain Points
One of the trickiest parts about mental load is how normalized it becomes—especially for women, caregivers, high-achievers, and neurodivergent folks. So this week, I invite you to take a real inventory. Not of what you’ve done—but of what you’ve been holding:
- What are you anticipating?
- What have you been emotionally managing for others?
- What are you overthinking or circling back to?
- What’s draining you, even if you haven’t physically done anything?
Sometimes stress doesn’t look like panic. It looks like flatness. Like disengagement. Like your brain buffering when someone asks what’s for dinner.
🧍♀️ The Help Dilemma
You may know you need help. But asking is its own weight. It makes you feel vulnerable. Or like you’re failing. Or you ask… and nothing happens. And now you’ve added disappointment to your already overflowing plate.
This is real.
It’s not you being dramatic.
It’s you reaching your capacity in a world that expects you to keep going anyway.
😮💨 Sitting with the Suck
There are moments when no fix comes fast enough. When delegation isn’t an option. When no one can swoop in. When what you need most is validation, not a solution.
And sometimes the most compassionate thing we can do is sit with ourselves and say:
“This is hard. This isn’t sustainable. And I’m allowed to feel this way.”
Because when we name it, we start to loosen the shame from it.
🚩 High-Achievers, I See You
If you’ve spent your whole life being “the responsible one,” it feels deeply uncomfortable to scale back. To say no. To let balls drop. To rest while others are still buzzing around. But you weren’t meant to live at the edge of burnout. You weren’t built to hold everything alone.
Doing less is not failure—it’s strategy.
The less you carry, the clearer your focus becomes.
💡 This Week’s Focus Practice:
Grab a notebook or voice note. Reflect on these:
- What’s one small thing I can let go of this week?
- What’s one sentence I could say that asks for help without overexplaining?
- What can I forgive myself for not getting to?
And above all: if you’re holding too much—it makes sense that you’re feeling stuck.
You don’t have to hustle your way out of heaviness.
You get to be human.
📥 Bonus Resource!
If you’re looking to build better attention habits, snag my FREE Navigating ADHD Mini Workbook!
It’s full of practical tools and mindset shifts—no overwhelm, no shame. Just real talk and doable steps.
Let’s clear the clutter and make space for what matters. 🌱
Amplify Wellness with Meg Duke 