Leah Ruppanner

We start to go, oh, I need to remember the milk because if I don't, my child will be hungry in the morning.

If they're hungry in the morning, they'll show up at school and they won't have enough energy because they will not have had breakfast.

And then if they don't have enough energy, they might not actually do as well in their test.

Now, if your brain starts to do this kind of like,

from A to B to C to disaster, this is in part because this is emotional thinking work.

How can we see it?

Because once we see it, we can't unsee it.

And once we see it, we can start to address it.

So, for example, right now, as you're listening to my voice, you may simultaneously be like, oh, I got to make sure that my kid's picked up or the dog is sick or have I called the vet or have I checked in to see if my aging parent has taken their medicine.

Second thing.

It's boundaryless.

You don't go like, I didn't do the dishes last night.

Let me just pack those up and put them in the car and bring them to work.

You don't, but you bring your mental load everywhere.

And third, it's enduring.

Because it's tied to the things we love the most, our family, our friends, our careers, our lives, our dreams, and our passions.

That's a really excellent question.

So I thank you for asking that because one of the things I could hear across all my research, across the data that I was collecting, is women felt really guilty.

They felt guilty and awful if they weren't 110% there for their family.

They weren't doing absolutely everything.