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Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio.
Good morning.
This is Laura.
Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.
Today's episode is going to be a longer one part of the series where I interview fascinating people about how they take their days from great to awesome and any advice they have for the rest of us.
So today I'm delighted to welcome Allison Damager to the Before Breakfast.
She is a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
She's also the author of the brand new book What's on Her Mind, which is about the mental load of family life.
So Allison, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me, Laura.
It's great to be with you.
Yeah, excited to have you.
So why don't you introduce yourself to our listeners?
Absolutely.
So as Laura said, I am a sociologist by training and profession.
And I study how gender shows up in family life.
So most of my work so far has looked at what that means for couples, both different gender and same gender couples.
How do they divide up the work that goes into keeping a household running, keeping children alive and reasonably happy, and with particular focus on the cognitive or mental aspects of that work?
Yeah, how would you define mental load?
So I think it's easiest to start with what it's not.
When we talk about housework, usually what people have in mind is I'm washing the dishes.
I am cooking a meal.
I am driving someone somewhere.
And what I have tried to show is that we also have to think about what's going on in people's minds.
What decisions are they making?
What problems are they troubleshooting?
And so I think about cognitive labor as sort of the work behind the scenes that makes everything else possible.
It's scanning the horizon for potential problems or opportunities or upcoming issues, doing research to figure out how to handle those making decisions and then following up to make sure all of that happened as you expected it to.
And what drew you to this topic?
I went into grad school intending to study something completely different.
And then in my first year classes I kept really feeling fired up by the readings I was assigned that talked about gender inequality in households.
And I had that sort of classic awakening moment where I realized that oh, these are not issues that were dealt with entirely by prior generations.
This is something that is still very much ongoing.
And I also thought that you know, most of the studies that I'm reading really focus on how people are using their time.
And there's important, right?
I'm talking to you, Lara, who is, of course, the expert on this.
But I think so much of what households need is hard to capture with a stopwatch.
It's all of the things that we know can be really taxing about making decisions in particular.
And I couldn't find work that really rigorously measured that thinking labor and captured how it was divided between men and women in households.
And so I set out to create an interview study where I could figure it out.
Yeah well, that's an interesting question, because if you're trying to ascertain how people are spending their time, I mean there's sort of relatively well-established ways of doing this.
I mean something like the American Time Use Survey, asking people what they were doing over the course of 24 hours, for instance.
Or people send out stopwatches and say you know OK, every time, this time you know what are you doing.
Write down in a journal what you're doing and we'll record it that way.
Yeah.
I know you've thought about this.
How does one measure what people are thinking about and sort of the stress or ease associated with what they're thinking about?
I mean, I could be thinking about what's for lunch, but it doesn't really stress me out that much.
So it's a different matter of that versus how is this kindergarten teacher going to be this year?
So how does one or any ideas you've come up with for how to measure that?
So one thing that some people have tried is what's called the experience sampling method.
In the old days, this would be a pager.
Nowadays it'd be a text notification where you randomly check in with people throughout the day and say what are you doing?
And what are you thinking about?
And how are you feeling about those things?
So that's one approach some people have taken.
I think the downside with that is it's hard to... capture the complexities of thought.
Often I'm thinking about you know 10 things over the course of a five minute period and I probably wouldn't write all those things down.
Another thing that people have tried to do is to put together a list of common areas of life that someone might be thinking about and say within the last X hours or days, have you thought about this?
What I did, because I was doing a smaller sample study with a couple hundred people.
I had this really painstaking approach where I asked people to do a modified version of a time log.
But rather than tracking their time and activities, I asked them to track their decisions.
Because my thinking was, usually we know when some sort of decision outcome has been reached.
And then when I met with them in the interview, I would have them work backwards and say oh, you decided to sign your child up for this camp.
How did you start thinking about this?
What other options did you consider?
Did you talk to your partner about it?
And so on.
And so then I would take what they told me in the interview and put together a picture of who was doing what in their household.
And I know you found that there was certainly a gendered aspect to this.
I'm sure our listeners are not surprised to hear that in at least many heterosexual couples that wound up being more women who were likely to do it.
But with that...
Many of your people that you were interviewed didn't have that as the explanation.
They weren't just like, well, yes, she does it because she's the mom or something like that.
They had other reasons they gave you as modern enlightened people, right?
This is the part that I found most interesting and a little bit surprising.
So you're absolutely right that most of the people I talked to, many of them were college educated living in big cities, the kinds of people who you know research would suggest are likely to have more egalitarian beliefs.
So they didn't tell me.
Oh, she does most of this thinking work because she's a woman and that's her job.
They told me she does most of this because she's type A.
She is just such an organized person.
She plans 10 steps ahead.
She's just on top of everything.
She's super mom.
And they wouldn't tell me.
Oh, he leaves all the thinking work to his wife because he's a man and it's not a man's job.
They would say, he's just so laid back.
He goes with the flow.
He is just in the moment and kind of taking things as they come.
But what I was able to show was OK.
I don't think that I accidentally discovered a cluster of type A women.
I think what was happening was people were taking gender stereotypes and gender roles and sort of switching the language a little bit to make it seem like it was about their individual personalities.
Because that's, you know, as you said, modern people.
We don't necessarily want to think of ourselves as individuals falling into traditional roles.
And so it's much easier and a way to prevent conflict to say, you know what?
It's just our personalities.
But I think gender has a lot to do with it.
Yeah, I was going to say because then when you looked at LGBT couples it didn't.
I mean, it wasn't quite like you weren't suddenly having two women in a couple, both being type A about it necessarily.
Exactly.
So there are a number of couples who and especially with the LGBTQ couples they didn't necessarily divide this work 50-50, but they also didn't fall into this very clear role where one person is the main thinker in all aspects of life and the other person is more laid back.
It was much more mix and match where okay, partner one does most of the thinking work related to food and shopping and home maintenance and partner two does most of the thinking related to the kids and travel and things like that.
So they mixed and matched in a way that didn't map onto any particular gender stereotype, which alerted me to okay, I think there's a gender thing going on here for the straight couples.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, we're going to take a quick ad break and then we'll be back talking about more of the practical side of this, how various people can sort of change the amount of mental load that they are carrying.
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Well, I am back talking with Professor Allison Damager, who's at the University of Wisconsin.
She is the author of the brand new book, What's on Her Mind?, about mental load and family life.
So we've been talking a little bit about her research and how one figures out how much mental load people are carrying and the gendered aspects of that.
But, you know, this is a very practical show.
The gender stuff is fascinating, but we want to talk more about practical.
Somebody listening to this feeling like, I am feeling overwhelmed.
I have a lot of mental load that I'm carrying.
I'm planning stuff all the time, keeping track of all the calendar.
What are some practical ways that they can go about carrying less?
And maybe that's not always just getting the other person to carry more.
I mean, there might be many ways to approach that.
You're absolutely right.
I think there are at least a couple pathways.
So I'm imagining it could be someone of any gender, but let's imagine it's, you know, the more common, okay, it's a woman carrying more of this work for her family.
Her two main options are to get someone else in her family to take on that work or someone beyond her family, right?
I know folks who have household managers and others who they pay to share the load in this way with them.
Number two would be find ways to just take more things off the family's collective plate, right?
So that no one has to work upon this sort of thing.
Now, if you want to go with path number one reallocation, I think step one has to be making what you are currently doing visible.
Oftentimes in households, one partner is who's doing this work, is feeling burdened by it, but their spouse either doesn't know all that they're holding or it only comes up in times of conflict, right.
When we're fighting about, oh, I'm stressed and you're not doing enough.
It doesn't necessarily happen where we sit down and have a really strategic discussion about.
Here are all the things I'm holding.
What are you holding?
How can we think about this?
What I find most commonly in couples is that they've sort of slid into particular patterns.
Oftentimes that is coming from, you know, what did their parents do?
What have they seen modeled around them?
All sorts of factors that sort of make it the path of least resistance for many couples to fall into a.
She does most of the planning and life management and he does less of it.
So what I first say is you want to decide, not default.
Make a conscious decision about what are we aiming for as a couple, as a family.
Are we okay with the current imbalance?
Presumably, you know, if they're asking this question, at least one partner is not okay with it.
So then the question becomes, okay, what would be more realistic given our current constraints?
I don't think it's realistic for people to go from 80-20 to 50-50 overnight.
There are many households for various reasons where that just would not be the ideal.
And so I think it's important for both partners to agree on what are we aiming for, what's important to us, and then to think about okay, how can we close the gap between where we are and where we want to be?
Now, there are some approaches that suggest sort of a complete overhaul of who's doing what.
My personal suggestion is to start small.
Pick the low hanging fruit.
And what I have seen is that, for a lot of reasons, the low hanging fruit is not the kid's birthday party or interacting with the teachers at school or planning the family gatherings.
The low hanging fruit for most families tends to be more internal to the household.
Right.
What are we eating for dinner?
How often are we cleaning things and repairing things, stuff that has lower stakes for doing differently or not being done in the exact same timeframe?
So I recommend picking a place where the person who's the primary cognitive laborer doesn't have super strong feelings.
They want it to get done, but they don't necessarily care that it be done in a particular way.
And then the crucial part is you've got to have some patience.
Most of this stuff is, a set of skills that gets built up over time.
And it's not reasonable to expect that, the minute you say okay, we're switching, and now person two is in charge of this, that they're going to do it exactly right.
That's why I think picking something that's a little bit lower stakes gives you a bit of wiggle room when there's some inevitable hiccups along the way.
Yeah, although it's funny because the skills I mean you mentioned it's skills, but the idea of scanning the horizon, seeing a problem or an opportunity and taking action toward it is not, I mean domestic.
That's what people do at work all the time.
So it's not that people don't have those skills regardless of their gender.
It's that they're usually not used to applying them in this particular context.
Correct.
And so that's another piece of advice that I often give to people where it's, you know, couples who feel like I'm just not, he's just not good at this, or she's just not good at this.
I recommend looking at what you do or have done professionally as a sort of a proven ground, right?
Most professions require some level of, as you say, scanning the horizon, planning ahead, being strategic.
And so asking, well, how have you done that in your hobbies or in your paid work or in school?
And then what skills might you transfer?
Because you're exactly right that I think It's not that these skills aren't there.
It's just they have not historically been deployed in this particular context.
And what about the option of kind of caring less?
I mean you said look at the low hanging fruit.
But it's possible when you sort of identify low hanging fruit.
And some people aren't partnered, too.
I mean, it's not there's.
There's somebody else that they can delegate this to if they need to reduce the mental load?
Some of it's going to have to come from not doing things.
I mean, is that reasonable?
So I think it is very reasonable.
I do want to be realistic that women especially are held accountable for a lot of domestic outcomes.
And so, while I would be the first to say I don't think it matters if your child is matching, you know, at school.
I don't think it necessarily matters that you got a thank you card out within six months of the event.
But you have to decide whether you're okay with the potential social consequences of not doing these things in this particular way.
If you are, then great.
Absolutely.
Drop it.
Let it go.
Or find a less time intensive or mental energy intensive way to perform the same function of say, acknowledging that you received a gift.
Maybe it's a text that it's in a picture or something like that.
Right.
There are often less labor intensive ways to achieve the same aims.
Yes, absolutely.
And with this, even if people don't wind up shifting how the mental load gets allocated.
You mentioned something that I read in the book that appreciation helps a lot, that some of this labor is just invisible.
Like nobody even knows that it happened.
You know, you come to your partner with like a list of your top two camps.
Your partner is like yeah, that looks like I like this one.
You're like, yeah, I like that one too.
And they don't know that there were 10 other camps that were examined and discarded before we got to the final two.
But making sure it's visible and then the other person expressing appreciation can go a long way.
Absolutely.
So one thing that my partner and I have done is inconsistently but when we do it it's great is at night we say one thing that we appreciated the other person having done that day.
And what often that's work for our household.
What that does is sort of signal hey, I saw that you were doing this.
I saw that you were working hard on this thing.
Sometimes we also share.
Hey, here's all the work that went into planning this trip.
Just so you know.
And the other person knows, oh, that's a signal that you are looking for some gratitude from me.
So I find too, that it can be really helpful to have some shared household project management tools.
We like to use Apple Notes and Google Calendar.
There are plenty of other technologies and more springing up every day, it seems.
And part of that is just a way of making it visible.
Whether or not you are equally sharing it or changing anything about how you're doing it, at least you can show yourself, as well as your partner that hey, this is valuable.
This is a lot.
I'm holding it.
I think for many people who are their family's primary cognitive laborer, just having language to say okay, even if I am not outside mowing the lawn or cooking a meal, there's a lot that I'm doing, a lot that I'm holding, and it makes sense that I might feel tired or overwhelmed from time to time.
Absolutely.
All right, we're going to take one more quick ad break and then I will be back with more from Allison Deminger.
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I bet you've probably been to the doctor's office in the past few months.
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Well, I am back talking with Allison Daminger, who is the author of the brand new book What's on Her Mind about the mental load of family life.
Professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
So pivoting a bit more toward your own schedule, I always like to hear do you have any routines that make you more productive?
Well, I am a bit in flux at the moment.
I have a five-month-old baby, my first child.
And so I am in the process of trying to figure out which of my old routines still holds in this new era.
But the one thing that I'm definitely holding on to is a kind of weekly planning session where I do both the professional and personal.
It's a brain dump of everything that I could possibly get done in that week.
And then I try to assign tasks to days.
So that is something that, even if the task lists are shorter and more flexible than they used to be, really keeps me grounded.
The other thing that I try to do is really sit down every morning and map out the day.
Sometimes that's Cal Newport time blocking style.
Sometimes, more often lately, it's just a post-it note where I list the five things that I must do.
But those help me to not face so much decision fatigue.
To cite some of my own research it's taxing to have to constantly make decisions about what you're doing.
And so I like to chunk that sort of thing and have my Sunday night self make most of those decisions about what I'll do.
Are you a morning person?
I mean, you said you're doing this in the morning.
You're mapping out the day.
Are you a morning routine kind of person?
I am.
And that's been one of the hardest parts so far about adjusting is my daughter is also a morning person, often a 5 am morning person.
And so, whereas previously I had time to kind of ease into the day reflect, this is often happening much later in the morning.
But usually it's when I first sit down at my desk.
This is the time when I get organized, think about the priorities and move forward, even if it's at 9 am rather than 7 am as it used to be.
Yeah.
And do you guys I mean you and your partner have active discussions about then you know, looking forward and knowing your research, as you're going to be making decisions about life for all three of you.
Who does what?
Yeah.
So we have historically had a Google document where we list out all of the different chores and areas of life that we're responsible for.
You know who's going to take our pet to the vet and who's going to make sure the car gets maintained.
We've been pretty good about putting both the physical chores and the associated cognitive work in that document.
And then we revisit when there's big transitions.
So we bought a house last year.
That was exciting, but it brought a whole new set of tasks and chores.
And we try not to assume that.
I think it's very easy just to be like oh, he's a man and so mowing the lawn is going to be him.
But we had a conversation earlier this year where I said actually I think I would enjoy mowing the lawn.
It's time outside, getting some exercise.
So that has become my task.
And we keep the spreadsheet updated and have to keep ourselves honest by periodically revisiting to make sure we haven't strayed too far from what we were intending to do.
I love that.
I love that you are mowing the lawn.
I suspect many people have in fact chosen lawn mowing as a chore because it's like hey, on the weekend I got to get outside.
I got it.
Sorry, I can't help with everything inside the house right now.
I got to get out and mow the lawn.
Exactly right.
But don't tell my husband that.
Don't tell your husband that.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
So I always ask my guests what is something you have done recently to take a day from great to awesome?
Well, I am in the stage of promoting my book, and that is something that does not come naturally to me as a rather introverted academic type.
I much prefer to quietly do my writing and then hope that people find it.
But what I have been doing is really reaching out to my network and saying hey, I've got this coming out.
You might be interested in it.
And it's been so nice to hear from people who I haven't connected with.
I feel a little bit weird about reaching out to them, but almost 100 of the time People are kind and excited and glad that I thought of them.
And so it's been a really good reminder for me that, if I believe that the work that I'm doing is important, sharing it with others is not just a benefit to me.
Hopefully it's enjoyable for them to reconnect with me.
So that's been something that I've been trying to build into my work each day.
Yeah, well, it's always fun to reconnect with people and to share good news.
What's something you're looking forward to?
Oh, I am really looking forward to next week is my book launch event in here in Madison, Wisconsin.
And so there's going to be some celebrations at my favorite bookstore in town.
And I think that that will be a little nerve wracking, but also a lot of fun.
So that's on the horizon for next week.
Oh, that's very exciting.
Well, anything in a bookstore is a big win in my book, as it were.
So Allison, where can people find you?
The best way to find me is at my website, allisondamager.com.
It has...
Links to my research, to buy the book, where I'll be speaking this fall.
You can also sign up for my newsletter, The Damager Dispatch, either via my website or at alisondamagersubstackcom.
And there I write about the intersection of gender and family life.
Absolutely.
All right.
Well, please check that out.
So Allison, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you to everyone for listening.
If you have feedback about this or any other episode, you can always reach me at laura, at lauravandercamcom.
In the meantime, this is Laura.
Thanks for listening.
And here's to making the most of our time.
Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast.
If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at laura at lauravandercam.com.
Before Breakfast is a production of iHeart Media.
For more podcasts from iHeart Media, please visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Today's tip is powered by National University.
As a listener of Before Breakfast, you know my goal is to help you make the most of your day without sacrificing work or family time.
That's why I'm so happy to introduce an institution that shares the same values.
If you are thinking about going back to school, you're probably wondering how to fit it all in.
National's flexible online formats, four- and eight-week courses and monthly class starts help you begin your degree sooner, finish faster and do it all on your own schedule.
So you have more options for managing work, family, and school.
With over 150 degrees, credentials and certificates to choose from, they have a program that fits your career goals.
Learn more today at nu.edu.
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