How to Balance Mental Load and Avoid Decision Fatigue in Relationships: Tips From a Los Angeles Couples Therapist
There are many obstacles to intimacy within partnerships, but learning to balance the mental load is one way to ensure sustained harmony. While it is important to acknowledge and work on the types of emotional labor in a marriage, being able to understand how mental load plays a role for each partner individually, as well as within the relationship, is a key component to the health of the couples’ bond. Talking out the role of mental load with a couples therapist in couples therapy is a surefire way to avoid decision fatigue, resentment, frustration, or disconnection within the partnership.
What Are The Ways in Which You Can Identify Mental Load in Your Relationship?
In addition to consulting a Los Angeles couples therapist, it is important to take a look at specific examples of the impact of mental load on your feelings toward yourself and your partner. Committing to a distraction-free time to engage in this discussion is a necessary practice. Here is a step-by-step process to examine the role of mental load in your relationship, and how it may be affecting you individually and as a couple.
Establish a Judgement Free Zone
Begin the conversation by affirming this as a judgment-free zone. Discussing mental load is not a time to compete with how much more one person may be taking on in the relationship than the other. It is not time to be defensive or to make accusations. This is very important to establish. As an effective discussion depends on curiosity, openness, and willingness to see from the other partner’s perspective. Even if that can be a challenge.
Choosing a Time Frame For Examination
To begin your discussion, agree to examine a specific time frame during a typical week. Ideally, one that tends to be stressful for both of you, or that has brought up arguments, misunderstandings, or tension in the past. Some trigger times to consider are weekday morning routines, weeks where one partner is traveling and one is home, Sunday evenings when you are both preparing for the week ahead, etc.
Silent Reflection
Set a timer for 15 minutes. During this time, each partner will try to write down everything they find themselves thinking about during the particular time frame you both have chosen to scrutinize. This should be done in silence as you will eventually be sharing your list with your partner. Any task that you perform, or decision you make, should go into your list. The idea is to write down as much as possible and to reflect on your state of mind in the time period you have chosen. For example, let’s say Sunday night before the weekday is one of the potential trigger times for a heavy mental load. Your list might look something like this:
Making decisions on outfits for the kids the next day.
What will the weather be like and how will their outfits need to reflect this? Will they need raincoats? Did the raincoats get put back in the closet the last time? Will they need to dress up more for school, or is it art or PE which means they should wear something suitable for those classes? Will they need changes of clothes for afterschool activities? Are their uniforms clean and ready to go if so? Which shoes should they wear? Where are the shoes? Who is doing laundry to ensure these items are clean and ready? Has the laundry been folded and put away? Is there enough detergent left? Will their hair need to be styled in a certain way depending on the day’s activities?
Navigating dinner.
Who is cooking what night? What are we cooking? How can we plan so that we have leftovers on busier nights? What is in the refrigerator that needs to be prepared before it goes bad? Are there enough ingredients for the meals we want to prepare for the week? Which grocery stores will we need to go to get the right supplies? If we are making curry chicken, often that means driving to another market to get the right curry as the neighborhood grocery often runs out of it. What about dietary restrictions and preferences? Who is doing the dishes and setting the table? Is everyone capped out from salads the week before, which will also alter the menu? How does eating out or takeaway factor into the budget? How will we divide who is cooking when with travel schedules, presentations, after-school activities, and work deadlines?
Understanding Your Partner’s Perspective
On a separate sheet of paper, write down all of the things that you think your partner may have written down regarding their mental load. Try to look at the time frame you’ve chosen to discuss from their point of view. Are Sunday evenings a challenge for them because they like to have some downtime to exercise and meditate before the week ahead? Are they making travel arrangements for work? Are they concerned about gas and car maintenance or commute schedules? Even if you do not think there is a mental load involved in these choices, write them down and be sure to be as specific as possible.
Sharing and Affirming
Before sharing what you have written, re-affirm that this is a judgment-free zone and commit once again to listening and engaging. This point in the process may bring up a lot of emotion, unresolved tension, or resentment. If that begins to happen, this is important to discuss further with a couples counselor. If you are both unable to proceed with a supportive conversation, working with a couples therapist is an ideal way to be sure you can each move forward from a place that takes one another’s needs into compassionate consideration.
One partner shares their list first, while the other partner listens, observes, and affirms. It is extremely helpful to acknowledge after the list is shared, that you have learned something. For example, “I had no idea that laundry and determining outfits for the week was such a point of stress for you.” After the list is shared, the other partner can then read what they thought the sharing partner’s mental load was. Did they guess correctly? Did they list mental load items that the first partner did not think of because they are so used to doing so much by rote that they were not able to identify them? What mental load aspects did the sharing partner take for granted? The receiving partner?
Exploring Emotional Responses
Discuss what emotions might have come up during the process. This part of the conversation may get complex and intense. If so, it is also a great starting point for further exploration in couples therapy. How do our family background and conditioning affect how we navigate the mental load within ourselves and our relationship? What assumptions have we made about mental load, especially in regard to gendered expectations? Do we always assume that one partner will make more domestic decisions than the other? Are we even aware of how many domestic decisions are made in a day?
Switch off to the other partner and follow the same pattern of discussion.
Creating Solutions
Propose how you may help one another’s mental load, both through action and ensuring that one person does not end up with decision fatigue. In the example of the laundry, maybe one partner offers to be sure that laundry is gathered, washed, dried, folded, and put away by Saturday evening so that Sunday evening becomes less chaotic. Maybe one partner checks on Sunday morning to be sure all rain jackets are back in the closet, all shoes are accounted for, and all backpacks have been cleaned out and are ready for school rather than waiting for these tasks last minute on Sunday evening.
Come up with practical choices that ensure you have one another’s back, and then be sure to follow through consistently. To go through this process, to come up with an agreement, and then subsequently not honor it, could potentially be very damaging to trust within the partnership. If this is a pattern that emerges, it is important to explore it further in couples counseling.
Creating Thoughtful Solutions to Combat Decision Fatigue
Surprise one another and be creative in your approach. One of the best ways to combat decision fatigue is to step out of our own experience and consider the needs of our partner. For example, let’s say Dad has spent Saturday afternoon working on the science fair project with one of the children. The experiments have taken far longer than expected, and he has been guiding their child through choices about how to work on the presentation, types of graphs to use, where to find the art supplies to make the trifold board, etc. Although he had planned to grill dinner that night, he didn’t have a window to see if the right ingredients were in the fridge for shish kebab, and he wasn’t sure if everyone had grown tired of that meal. Mom has been working all afternoon trying to prepare for a conference the next week.
Her decision-making has been more in the professional realm than in the domestic one, and she recognizes Dad’s exhaustion. Rather than approach him with the mental load of “What are we doing for dinner?” she instead checks the refrigerator, figures out what ingredients they have, and presents two potential plans to Dad: “What would be most helpful to you? There are not enough ingredients for shish kebab, so I can run to the store and get them, and prep for you to grill, or I can make the dal that we planned for Tuesday tonight instead.”
By offering a clear plan with a distinct choice, Mom has helped relieve some of Dad’s potential decision fatigue—now he no longer has to search through the fridge, figure out if the meal can be made, etc. It is important to note that abating decision fatigue is not about one person taking over the labor for the other, but rather a way to offer thoughtful solutions that take the other person’s mental load into account. Another example of this would be if Dad knows that Mom still has socks to fold for the week, and rather than ask her if he should fold them, he just does, thereby saving her from having to make a decision about who should fold them and when.
Seeking Guidance With Couples Therapy in Los Angeles
Family dynamics and relationships are often challenged by the mental load. Both what we acknowledge and what we don’t, by what is invisible and what is obvious. By being able to sit with how mental load impacts your relationship, you will only increase trust, intimacy, and harmony when you work on it together as a couple. Because it can be such a loaded and intense subject, talking through strategies to cope with mental load with a couples therapist is a great way to fight off decision fatigue and ensure a balance in your relationship.
Avoiding a detailed examination of mental load can often lead to long-term resentment, arguments, breaches in communication, and not feeling seen within the relationship. Looking at mental load early on--before it becomes out of balance—and talking to a couples therapist at Therapy for Adults is an ideal way to ensure both partners are aware of one another and are working together to sustain a healthy and compassionate bond.
Ready to Balance Mental Load & Avoid Decision Fatigue With The Help of Couples Therapy in Los Angeles, CA?
If you find the discussion on mental load resonating with your relationship, consider taking a proactive step towards understanding and resolving these challenges by seeking couples therapy. At Therapy for Adults, a trained couples therapist can provide a judgment-free space for open communication, guiding you and your partner through structured exercises to unpack and address the complexities of mental load. By addressing this crucial aspect early on, you pave the way for increased trust, intimacy, and a harmonious partnership, ensuring a healthier and more compassionate bond for the long term. Follow these three simple steps to get started:
Contact me today for a free consultation to see if couples therapy in Los Angeles is right for your relationship
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Other Counseling Services I Offer in Los Angeles
At Therapy for Adults, I offer support for anyone experiencing relationship issues, not just couples. In addition to helping you and your partner balance mental loads to avoid decision fatigue in couples counseling, I offer dating coaching and therapy for dating and relationship issues. Additionally, I help highly sensitive people process their uniqueness and appreciate their surroundings and rich internal life. All of these services are available through online therapy throughout California. Check out my blog for more articles!
