17- Understanding The Mental Load Imbalance Is Not Bringing Relief.... Do This Counterintuitive Thing Instead

Your brain says the mental load is real, but your body still hits the panic button the moment you try to rest. Let’s bridge that gap. We unpack why awareness alone doesn’t bring relief and show how to lead your nervous system so rest, partnership, and delegation feel safe instead of risky.

We start by naming the invisible engine behind overfunctioning: a manager-heavy system trained in childhood to read the room, prevent mistakes, and brace for impact. Think of an event planner stuck in emergency mode 24/7—hypervigilant, list-driven, and convinced that softness equals irresponsibility. That inner manager isn’t wrong; it’s outdated. It learned to protect you when safety was conditional and consequences were yours to carry. Now it treats easing up as danger and blocks relief even when your mind understands the pattern.

Rather than override this protector, we update it. We practice compassionate dialogue with the inner essential worker: I see how hard you’re working; I know why you don’t trust partnership; I’m not asking you to disappear. Then we turn toward the tender parts it guards—the younger self who never got to rest—and offer reparenting through consistent care. The practical path isn’t more discipline. It’s co-regulation, micro-pauses, and repeatable experiences of safety: one deliberate pause before acting on guilt, one low-stakes task left undone, one end-to-end lane owned by your partner, one small ritual of rest even while the house isn’t perfect.

Across the conversation, we map the costs of permanent emergency mode—resentment, withdrawal from intimacy, resistance to delegation—and offer clear steps to rebuild shared leadership at home. You’ll learn how to shift from white-knuckling to self-leadership, how to calibrate your body to updated conditions, and how to help your system believe what your mind already knows: the crisis has changed. Subscribe, share with a friend who carries the mental load, and leave a review to tell us which small experiment you’ll try this week.

Come follow me on instagram @MentalLoadCoach and subscribe to my newsletter here. Looking forward to adventuring with you!

Chapters

• 0:00 Naming The Mental Load Imbalance
• 3:30 Why Awareness Doesn’t Bring Relief
• 6:45 The Manager-Heavy System Explained
• 10:50 Living Like An Essential Worker
• 15:20 Childhood Roots Of Hypervigilance

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

This one is called If You Understand the Mental Load Imbalanced, but still don't feel the relief, here's what to do instead. And I'm gonna talk about one counterintuitive thing to do. And it's not gonna be what you think it is. So if you're listening to this episode, you're probably past the point of wondering whether or not there's a pattern or imbalance. You understand that there's a mental load imbalance going on in your household. And you already know that it didn't start with you. It started in your childhood. It doesn't mean that the mental load imbalance isn't an indication that your husband or partner is doesn't care about the situation, doesn't work hard enough. In fact, you probably are in a situation where there's a lot of misunderstanding between you and your partner. And you probably both work really hard, but are experiencing a lot of disconnect. And you're also probably, if you saw my last live stream, you probably noticed that the mental load imbalance didn't start with you. It started a long time ago with how your family history, your childhood, and how you were socialized. You were socialized and programmed and conditioned to be alert and hyper-vigilant. And you were programmed to walk into a room and just have immediately have a list of things that you need to do according to what you observe. You've been deeply conditioned and trained to basically read the room and do what you needed to do accordingly. And that overfunctioning that we talked about in the past is very over-protective. It was very protective. It does great adaptive and protective strategy. And still, even knowing this, like knowing that you're conditioned to be this way, won't calm your body down. And you tell yourself, I get it, I understand it. And the moment you try to rest or even delegate something, or soften, that panic or guilt rushes in. And that's the space that we're talking about today. We're gonna live in that space for a little bit. And most of the people at the stage have tried a lot. They've tried telling yourself that you don't need to do everything. You're like being a minimalist and trying to minimize your expectations or commitments, or you've tried reminding yourself that your partner is a very capable person and you intellectually understand your trauma history and your family history. And you're probably in therapy right now. You've probably already tried going to therapy, I guess. That's another thing that people try. You've tried pushing yourself to let it go. You tell yourself, I shouldn't let it go and trust more. Another thing that you've probably tried is to explain your needs more clearly or tell your partner, like, this is exactly why I'm frustrated, and this is what you need to do. And so what you're noticing is that nothing really sticks. Here's why. The reason is you're actually trying to change behavior without doing any of the internal work that's required to expand your nervous system in order to allow that behavior shift to stick. And without addressing the internal system that believes it's preventing disaster, your body isn't allowing your insight to stick. It's just ignoring your insight and awareness and it's bypassing your and it's responding to a deep default. So it's responding to what believes is an ongoing crisis. So when you try to relax, your system hears, oh my gosh, we're lowering our guard. When you try to delegate, it hears, oh my gosh, we're opening ourselves up to be more vulnerable to harm. And that's why awareness has not brought relief. Intellectual awareness about the mental load imbalance does not bring relief until you do the internal work to make space for it in your nervous system. And this is why this is what we're actually dealing with, the internal system. When we are talking about the mental load and folks who are going into overfunctioning mode, it's what we call a manager heavy system. So it's if you are familiar with project management, if that's something that your job does, or event planning. Event planning is a great example of what require what's like a manager-heavy system. Event planning folks have to think really far ahead and think about all the worst-case scenarios that could happen when you're planning like a wedding, for example, and you are in proactive mode. And if you are an event planner for long enough, you know that sometimes you can find yourself stuck in that mental loop, even when you're off the clock, even when you're not in job mode, like right before you go to sleep, you have these like experiences of being in your head about the to-do list, or in the middle of the night, sometimes you get jolted up by a shot of adrenaline that tells you to not forget something. Or the first thing you wake up, there's like this surge of words that come alongside the to-do list that you need to do for the rest of the day. And what I like to compare this to, that stuckness, is it operates like an essential worker in a permanent emergency. And you remember how that was with COVID five, six years ago, during the beginning of COVID. Like essential workers were called out to hospitals or to whatever, and they were in this different mode. You had to be in this mindset as an essential worker that you basically are risking your life out there. And this includes a manager inside your mind with a voice that tracks everything, anticipates risks, prevents mistakes, and stays emotionally braced. And it learned this job. It's like not something that you just fall into or grow, like you just all of a sudden have one day. You actually are slowly conditioned to be trained to be this way. And it comes from folks with a childhood where you had to grow up really fast, where no one was gonna come rescue you, and mistakes had huge consequences that you had to deal with on your own. So, of course, it doesn't trust in the goodness rest. It doesn't trust in partnership because there was no one that came to get you. And also it resists shared ownership and partnership. Because from the manager's perspective, this internal voice that's inside that operates like uh essential worker in a permanent crisis, softness feels like irresponsibility. It feels like denial, it feels like gaslighting of your lived experience. And I don't know if you remember back in 2020 or 2021, in the beginning of the COVID crisis. Like whenever you were in a social gathering and you were not wearing a mask, it felt extremely, well, for me at least, it felt really anxiety-provoking and really irresponsible to not wear a mask. I felt like deeply guilty if somebody else got my germs and they were sick or something. And I remember I could not relax during that time. I was on high alert. And this doesn't mean that your manager is wrong. This voice inside of you is wrong that causes you to overfunction and your mental load imbalance. It means that your manager doesn't know that the crisis is over. So I'm not here to say that COVID is over because there's a lot of immunocompromised folks that really are still living the effects and the impacts of isolation because they are immunocompromised. But in general, for a lot of us with without immunocompromised systems, we are living life without masks. We walk into the day-to-day functioning like it was before COVID. And to a lot of us, we got the memo: like COVID is over, it's downgraded in its intensity. But a lot of us operate as if our childhood crises are not over yet. The cost, this is the cost of how it shows up in how you're coping right now. Because this essential worker that lives inside your brain believes everything is urgent, a few things start happening. You continue to overfunction with resentment instead of pride. You stay deeply engaged with your children, but you emotionally withdraw from your partner and you avoid delegation, not because you don't want support, but because it feels unsafe or invalidating. And slowly the system shifts. There's less room for connection with your partner, there's less room for shared leadership, there's less room for co-regulation, and there's less room for rest. Not because you don't value those things, but because your system truly believes that if you rest, it will threaten a sense of safety that you and so what you actually want isn't to stop caring, right? Like we don't want to stop caring about our family. We want relief without guilt, we want partnership without danger, and we want to rest without collapse, to stop feeling like we're the only line of defense. You want your body to believe what your mind already knows, and that's the real desire. You want your body to believe that the crisis is over and it can truly rest. So, this is a part that often surprises people in how I present how to work with the mental load and how we as mental load owners overfunction. The way out of the mental load imbalance is partially not to override this essential worker in your brain, but it's to update the essential worker in your brain. And we're trying to, if we try to shut down that voice inside of us, it tells us to overfunction and as if it's operating in a permanent crisis, it will always fail because it believes it's keeping your children alive. And instead, the work is to approach this voice that kind of believes that it's a permanent crisis with curiosity and a lot of compassion. To say to yourself, to this voice, I see how hard you're working, I understand why you don't trust your partnership, and I'm not asking you to go away. And then critically, compassionately turn towards what you're guessing, the manager, the essential worker might be protecting. Beneath the hypervigilance that essential worker has is usually a tender, vulnerable feeling that they're protecting you from. A tender, vulnerable part of you that learned that safety was conditional and not guaranteed, that a part that felt really deeply alone during a period of instability, and the part that never got to rest. So, my guess is if you are a mental load earner like me, that you probably had to grow up really fast, that you probably learned that no one was coming to rescue you, that you had to figure it out on your own, that safety was conditional and really not guaranteed, that you probably lived in deep instability, even though your life on the outside looked really put together. And so that is the force sometimes that causes us to overfunction. And that force contributes to the mental load imbalance. And this is not to blame mental load owners to say, oh, we are that problem. But what I'm saying and inviting you to do is to consider that there is something inside of us that drives us to overfunction, even if it's against our interest or desires. And that part of us that overfunctions can't really soften until they're met with love and curiosity and really inner child reparenting. This reparenting. We're thinking, like, oh, I'm a parent to my physical children who are 11, 8, and four years old. But what I want to invite you to consider is that you have children inside of you that are younger versions of you that have not gotten that support that they needed. And actually, they're like in some ways acting out right now in order to get your attention. And part of that work is to look inward and to notice, okay, what parts of me require my attention? What parts of me require the same kind of loving parenting that I'm offering my kids? And that's why just letting it go does not work because we're not really doing behavior change stuff. We're doing that internal work that requires energy shift. So, what does that mean, practically speaking? It means that your job right now is not to delegate more or lower your standards or to force yourself to trust your partner more. That's not what I'm asking you to do. Your job right now is to notice where the panic or guilt arises, recognize that voice that brings that panic and guilt as an essential worker inside your heart or brain that believes that it's in a permanent crisis, and not believe it as truth, but pause before you act on it and gently ask yourself, what are you afraid of if you didn't overfunction? And that pause before that action is the beginning of self-awareness or it's a continuation of your self-awareness. It's not over-controlling, it's not collapsing, it's self-leadership. So if you want real change going forward and not just intellectual insight that will give you the light bulb moment or aha moment, which for me as a therapist, I do not think that it's worth chasing the light bulb moments. By the way, they you need to consider this. Your system does not need more discipline, it needs co-regulation. Your manager inside of you that believes that you're in an essential, that believes it's an essential worker inside a permanent crisis, does not need silencing. It needs safety. Your exhaustion isn't proof that you're doing it wrong. It is proof that you've been caring too much alone for too long. And safety does not come from you alone, but your system won't believe that until it experiences something different. And now, if you're on the place of saying, I know why I overfunction, but I still don't know how to stop, that doesn't mean that you're stuck. It just means that you're standing on the fence between understanding and transformation. And that next step is not doing less, it's just leading your system differently. So it's start and it starts by befriending the parts of you that never got the memo that the crisis has changed. So I hope that was helpful.