The mental load advice FALLING on the people already carrying the most

Harvard Business Review published a piece the other week on the invisible work draining your best employees, and the problem is very true. Hours, deadlines and output miss most of what makes work tiring. The effort of remembering, chasing, coordinating and holding half a dozen half-finished things in your head never appears on a timesheet, and the mental load it creates is real.

Then comes the fix. Make the load visible. Set clearer boundaries around availability. Model recovery, because staff won’t believe they’re allowed to switch off unless leaders demonstrate it first.

Every one of those is more work though, or ironically more load to think about. And all of it lands on managers.

Resilience, before anyone raises it

Worth settling one thing early, because it sits underneath every conversation about mental load.

Resilience does grow from difficulty. It grows when someone faces something hard and then recovers from it and realises they survived, which is why bounded challenge builds people and unrelieved pressure sustained over time wears them down. So the useful question is whether this cognitive load has a limit and whether recovery actually happens, rather than whether we protect people too much. Which of course is entirely dependent on each person and their personal circumstances, but there is every possibility that if the load at home is also high with no relief, the compounding effect of both will send more people on the path to burnout.

Why managers carry the most mental load

Organisations spent a decade removing the layers that used to absorb coordination, and flattening the hierarchy pushed that work onto whoever was left. Spans widened. This means that managers are coordinating more than ever – across teams, systems, departments. Then every new platform, restructure and AI rollout arrives at the same layer to be absorbed. Nobody schedules that absorption or counts it. And 58% of new managers receive no training at all before any of it starts.

So the group being asked to model calm is the group with the least control over its own diary. That’s the circularity in the advice, and it’s why so much wellbeing work fails to move anything.

Mental load is overhead, not work

The distinction is the whole argument.

Mental load sits around the task rather than inside it. Remembering who’s waiting on what. Chasing the thing you delegated. Switching from one system to another and reloading your place. Working out who actually has the authority to decide.

None of that is productive effort. It’s the friction created by how the organisation is put together, which means it’s the product of decisions somebody made, and decisions can be unmade.

That reframes the whole subject. Mental load is an operations problem wearing wellbeing clothing, so a mindfulness app was never going to touch it.

Count the switches

Tech friction is where mental load stops being abstract.

Every new platform costs everyone a little switching time, and it costs managers most, because they coordinate across more systems than anyone they manage, performance management, procurement, internal recruiting…the list goes on. Each switch carries a reload cost: finding your place, remembering the password, recalling which of the two similar tools holds the thing you need.

We’ve written before about the hidden cost of supervising AI output rather than benefiting from it, and the same principle applies to every system added in the name of efficiency. Efficiency for the organisation frequently means overhead for the individual.

The useful thing about switching is that you can count it. Ask how many systems a manager touches to get through one ordinary week. That number exists, and it can come down.

Capacity isn’t a fixed number

I don’t often share personal anecdotes here, but I lost about three months of productivity to low ferritin. My thinking slowed, my patience went, and the load I’d handled for years slowly started to feel like too much until it was too much and a blood test confirmed what was wrong with me. The work hadn’t changed. My capacity to absorb it had.

There’s a mechanism behind that. Iron is a required cofactor for tyrosine hydroxylase, the rate-limiting enzyme in dopamine production (yup, you got some science today), so low iron stores can slow the systems that govern attention, motivation and task initiation. Research on women reporting attention difficulties has found higher rates of iron deficiency and heavy menstrual bleeding among them, and the wider evidence on ferritin and attention is genuinely mixed rather than settled. Low iron doesn’t cause the conditions it can imitate.

The point is that human capacity moves, for reasons that have nothing to do with work and that nobody at work can see. Iron, sleep, life stage, an ill parent, everything the menopause conversation has spent five years trying to make visible.

Organisations design workflows as though capacity is a constant, and it behaves like a variable. So the mental load rises on a steady line while the ability to carry it moves up and down underneath, and the two lines cross somewhere nobody is watching.

Nobody owns removal

Which brings us to why nothing ever gets taken away.

Adding a process has an owner. Someone sponsors it, writes the business case, runs the launch, reports on adoption and gets credit at the end of the year.

Removing a process has nobody. No one gets promoted for retiring a system. Nobody builds a career on killing a meeting. So complexity accumulates year after year, not because anyone wants it, but because addition is somebody’s job and subtraction is nobody’s.

That’s the practical answer to a problem that usually gets treated as unsolvable. Give removal a name against it.

Five things that would actually reduce the mental load

Worth considering when the next wellbeing initiative comes round:

• Put someone in charge of removal, with the same standing as whoever owns rollout.
• Run one-in-one-out on systems and on recurring meetings. Adding one means retiring one.
• Count the switches. Nine systems in a working week is a measurable number, and measurable numbers can fall.
• Write down who decides what, because a large share of coordination load is people working out where authority sits.
• Test every new initiative with one question: what does this take off someone’s plate? If the answer is nothing, it’s adding load in the name of reducing it.

That last one is the cheapest diagnostic in the list and it disqualifies a surprising amount of what gets proposed.

When organisations won’t subtract, people subtract themselves

There’s an exit route here, and the numbers suggest it’s getting busier.

Around 1.8 million women in the UK now run their own venture or work for themselves, the highest share on record, with women making up roughly one in three UK entrepreneurs after a 36% rise in business ownership since 2015. Fractional and portfolio work has grown alongside it, particularly among mid-career professionals, though much of the data on that comes from firms who place fractional talent and should be read with that in mind.

Plenty of people leave for the obvious reasons: money, ambition, a good idea. Some are doing something narrower. Going independent removes the coordination overhead at a stroke, because you stop attending other people’s meetings, stop maintaining other people’s systems, and stop holding context for work that isn’t yours.

Going independent is subtraction, carried out unilaterally, by the only person in a position to authorise it.

The organisations losing people this way tend to lose them at fifteen years in, after all the development spending and just before the return on it, which is the same stretch of career where women are already judged differently on the way up.

None of that requires a new programme. It requires somebody with authority to go looking for what could come off the list, and then to actually take it off.

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