The Difference Between Mental Load and Emotional Labor
Defining the parts and pieces that make up home life.
Posted August 25, 2025 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
This post is co-authored by Molly Dickens, Ph.D.
The English lexicon is always evolving to accommodate our lived reality. In the last decade, we have seen many terms find their way into the mainstream that help us describe the full experience of home life. As it relates to household labor, we now use a range of terms to describe the various parts and pieces, like physical tasks, emotional labor , invisible load, mental load, and cognitive labor.
The problem is that we have hit a point of conflation in both academic and mainstream writing. How are these words similar? What are the differences? When do we use “emotional labor” and when do we use “mental load"?
This post’s purpose is to define four key terms and establish a core language to connect a diverse array of experts and specialists. We are intentionally not discussing gender implications here; we simply want to suggest a shared vocabulary so we have the language for more nuanced discussions.
Physical tasks are things you actually do with your hands: cook dinner, wash the car, change diapers, dust bookshelves, do grocery shopping. These are things that check a box —when you complete each task, you can tick it off a to-do list and move on to other things. They have a clear start and stop and, after they are done, they provide us a sense of completion. Some people find relief, even pleasure, in a completed physical task: We love the way our yard looks when the leaves are raked; we love how the house feels after a dust and vacuum.
Traditionally, physical tasks are further categorized as inside vs. outside, or routine vs. intermittent. Inside tasks often overlap with routine tasks—those that need doing every day—like cooking, cleaning, childcare, pet care. Outside tasks often overlap with intermittent tasks—those that happen once in a while—like reviewing the credit card statement or mowing the lawn.
Physical tasks can be enjoyable. You may like to listen to music while washing dishes, or find that gardening relieves stress . But physical tasks can also feel frustrating. If you get saddled with doing a chore you particularly dislike, or don’t really know how to do, it can be additionally taxing.
Cognitive labor , as defined by Allison Daminger, is the thinking work associated with our domestic labor. Daminger breaks cognitive labor into the following component parts:
Doing research and weighing options
For example, perhaps sometime around February every year, the cognitive laboring parent starts to think about summer break. This person anticipates the 10-week break from school and knows they need to line up camps and family to help fill the days.
Then come the hours of research: This person needs to network with other parents, talk to family and friends, research available camps, price out various options and locations, and figure out when each camp sign-up window starts so they don’t lose out on their kids’ top choices. Then there comes the step of actually making a decision, and signing up for the desired camps, committing to weeks with grandparents, or putting in for vacation time.
Then later on in the summer, this parent will also constantly evaluate if each camp worked, or didn’t. Are there short-term tweaks to make the kids happier now, and are there long-term tweaks to make next summer run more smoothly?
This process may sound familiar because it closely resembles the Project Management Cycle that many people have experienced in a professional setting.
Unlike the box-checking of physical tasks, cognitive labor is more akin to plate-spinning (with the exception of a stopover for making decisions). Like the old circus trick, the skill is all about keeping an eye on all spinning plates at once—dashing back and forth to keep them all from dropping. This requires constant vigilance and attention ; you look away for a few seconds, and your plates fall and crash to the ground. When one is the cognitive laborer in the home, the number of plates spinning can become increasingly overwhelming.
Cognitive labor also mirrors inside and outside tasks—and inside tasks often require more cognitive labor because of the daily requirement. Cooking a meal is one thing, but anticipating what everyone will eat, finding a time when everyone is home, and shopping for ingredients may take more thinking time than the actual labor of preparing the meal.
Cognitive labor is rarely a discrete task, and it feels weightier because people do cognitive labor alongside other tasks and activities. We do cognitive labor in the shower, while exercising, while driving, when we use the bathroom; we often do cognitive labor while we do physical tasks—for example, thinking through next week’s car pool while folding laundry.
It is hard to escape cognitive labor. It intensifies during holidays and often follows you on vacation. The ever-present feeling of spinning plates feels particularly weighty, and the more plates you’re spinning, the harder it becomes.
Arlie Hochschild first defined emotional labor in her 1983 book, The Managed Heart . Emotional labor is closely linked to cognitive labor in that it is also about plate spinning. The difference is that emotional labor relates to how we feel about the plates that we spin.
We can break emotional labor into two general categories:
Regulating one’s own emotions to maintain household harmony. This is how emotional laborers feel about themselves; how they judge themselves when those plates stop spinning and break, and the reason(s) they feel the need to spin them at all in the first place. This could also mean suppressing personal feelings to protect others. (For example, masking exhaustion after work to make a family meal.)
Let’s use the example of back-to-school supply shopping. The cognitive laborer will need to anticipate the needs, find the list on the school’s website, and schedule time to get to the store before the first day of school.
But emotional labor adds in the layer of “how will my child feel” about going back to school, such as the recognition that your specific kid might want specific markers or a specific color of folder or a specific backpack. An emotional laborer acknowledges that fulfilling the category of want for specific supplies is just as important as fulfilling the need to have the supplies. Having the “right” supplies on the first day of school can make a child feel calm, confident, and ready for the school year, whereas the “wrong” supplies can frazzle kids, get them off on the wrong foot, create social anxiety , or, worst-case scenario, cause a Day 1 meltdown. Both scenarios will likely play out in the mind of the emotional laborer, which is why purchasing the “right” supplies feels so important.
With emotional labor wrapping around cognitive labor, going to Target to buy supplies is not solely about finding the cheapest option and throwing stuff in the cart. It’s about somehow making your kids feel loved when they leave the house and head out for their first day of school.
In our plate-spinning analogy, when the plates feel heavy and important because they are tied to the care of those we love and the emotional labor we feel compelled to do, we call that combination the mental load . As Leah Ruppanner and colleagues defined it, domestic mental load builds up when cognitive labor and emotional labor overlap.
The team adds that mental load includes three additional key characteristics:
Ruppanner explains mental load as "emotional thinking" work, which is hard to understand and often impossible to describe because, until now, we have not had the language to fully describe it. Ruppanner has set out to fully define and measure mental load, compiling her research in her upcoming book Drained: Reduce Your Mental Load to Do Less and Be More .
We acknowledge that this area of study continues to evolve, and look forward to future contributions. We also believe these concepts need not stop with the nuclear domestic space; all of these labors and loads can translate to the workplace, a community group, volunteer positions, or the extended family.
Molly Dickens, Ph.D., is a scientist, writer, and women’s health advocate. She writes about the intersection of stress, health, and structural changes to better support working parents and caregivers on her Substack, The Maternal Stress Project.
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Kate Mangino, Ph.D., is the author of Equal Partners: Improving Gender Equality at Home.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.