Easing the Mother Load

We asked, you answered. One of our biggest missions at Mother Brand is to ensure that you feel heard and seen - so when we say we’re listening, you can be confident that we actually mean it.  

In our Research Q and A we found over 90% of mothers struggled with the mental load involved in motherhood. We asked you for tools or resources that you used to help ease this, and can you guess the most popular answer? 

The humble list. 

Psychologist and author Dr David Cohen believes that lists help us to “dampen anxiety about the chaos of life; they give us a structure, a plan that we can stick to; and they are proof of what we have achieved that day, week or month”.

However, does the issue come when there are multiple lists, and they’re largely in our (the mothers) heads? Would sharing these lists help? Or perhaps we want them to be personal to us so that we can keep ourselves on track and not have to delegate out or double check that things have been done? 

Many of the mothers we spoke to had joint calendars with their partners and whiteboards in the kitchen with the week and days mapped out in minute detail. Yet still the to do lists (with life admin, school & nursery info, food shops and family birthdays) were kept on phones, in personal notebooks or simply in the midst of the mental load. 

We want to help you manage the mental load in a way that works for you.

We have made a start popping together a resource library of useful links, tools, apps, courses, podcasts and lifelines that could help you in various ways. We can’t take the mental load away… but we can talk about it and make it manageable. 

And of course, we want to build this over time as a community. If you have any helpful tools you think would benefit others, please reach out:

email: emily@motherbrand.me / DM us: @motherbrand.me