The Liz Moody Podcast - How To Get Him To ACTUALLY Carry The Mental Load (Former Man Child Explains)

Episode Date: September 23, 2026

Ever gotten in a fight with your partner over chores? Me too. You might be carrying more of the mental load.  It’s a term many of us know, but awareness of it isn’t enough. A lot of couples disagree on what things should be done, what a “good job” looks like, and some people just refuse to do more, period. Well, today, we get into the mental load conversation no one else is having.  I'm joined by Zach Watson, who is one of the few men who's actually leading the mental load discourse. Zach Watson is a certified Fair Play facilitator, has been featured in The New York Times, CNN, Forbes, and built an audience of more than 1.4 million followers.  🎧 What you’ll learn: • The 4 types of invisible labor • The BUILD meeting that got Zach to do more chores • Why men who take on more mental load actually get happier • How to tell what’s a mental load problem vs. a high standard problem • How men are capable of using the same skills at work to fix their home life • Why making more money doesn’t necessarily mean doing less at home • The link between mental load and your sex life P.S. This is a great episode to listen to with your partner! Check out the previous episodes of The Liz Moody Podcast discussed today: “Invisible Labor Is Damaging Your Relationships–But This 6 Minute Exercise Can Change Everything with Eve Rodsky” • Listen on Apple • Listen/Watch on Spotify “How To Create Your Dream Sex Life, Have More Orgasms, Give Amazing Oral, & More With Vanessa and Xander Marin” • Listen on Apple • Listen/Watch on Spotify For more from Zach Watson:  • Website: https://zachmentalloadcoach.com/  • Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zachmentalloadcoach  Ready to uplevel every part of your life? Order Liz’s book 100 Ways to Change Your Life: The Science of Leveling Up Health, Happiness, Relationships & Success now!  Connect with Liz on Instagram @lizmoody or online at www.lizmoody.com. Subscribe to the substack by visiting https://lizmoody.substack.com/welcome.Buy our cute sweatshirts, conversation cards, and more at https://shop.lizmoody.com/. Use our discount codes from our  highly vetted and tested brand partners by visiting https://www.lizmoody.com/codes.  To join The Liz Moody Podcast Club Facebook group, go to www.facebook.com/groups/thelizmoodypodcast. This episode is brought to you completely free thanks to the following podcast sponsors: • Our Place: check out FromOurPlace.com/LizMoody and use code LIZMOODY for 10% off sitewide. • OneSkin: for a limited time, try the new OS-01 FACE RICH Cream for 15% off using code LIZ at OneSkin.co/Liz.  • Puori: visit https://Puori.com/LizMoody and use code LIZMOODY at checkout for a discount and special offer. • LMNT: head to DrinkLMNT.com/Liz to get a FREE 8-count sample pack with any order. • Seed: go to Seed.com/LizMoody and use code LIZMOODY to get 25% off your first month. • Wildgrain: go to Wildgrain.com/LizMoody (or use promo code LIZMOODY at checkout) to get $30 off your first box + FREE croissants for LIFE. The Liz Moody Podcast cover art by Zack. The Liz Moody Podcast music by Alex Ruimy. This podcast and website represents the opinions of Liz Moody and her guests to the show. The content here should not be taken as medical advice. The content here is for information purposes only, and because each person is so unique, please consult your healthcare professional for any medical questions. The Liz Moody Podcast Episode 467. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you've ever felt exhausted, burnt out, and maybe even kind of resentful of keeping track of the appointments, the groceries, who needs what and when in your relationship, that's because you might be carrying more than your fair share of the mental load. It is a term that many of us are familiar with at this point, but if we all get it, why are so many of us still struggling in our relationships? Turns out a lot of couples disagree on what things should be done and what doing something well actually looks like. Some people just refuse to do more, period. Some people think the mental load discussion is overblown and it's causing way more problems, and other people think that discussing it and solving it is the key to long-term relationship success, happiness,

and even great sex. So today, we're going to get into the mental load conversations that no one else is having with one of the few men who's actually leading the mental load conversation. Zach Watson has built an audience of more than 1.4 million social followers. He's been featured in The New York Times, CNN, Forbes, and more. He is a certified fair play facilitator, and his first book is being published by Penguin Random House in 2027. Heads up, this is a really great place to pause and grab your partner, because it would be a phenomenal conversation starter to listen to this episode together. Welcome to the Liz Moody podcast, where we believe that there is always something that you can do to create a life that feels amazing, and we help you figure out how to find the lever to pull at any moment to actually do that.

Zach, you describe yourself as a recovering man-child. What do men get wrong about the mental load and invisible labor? They think that execution, like the physical aspect of it, is owning the mental load. So I know you did a skit recently of being in the grocery store and saying, hey, babe, hey, babe, like, where's this thing? I don't see this thing, but let's get this thing. Let's say that the pretext of that video was, Zach says to Liz, I'll go do the grocery shopping for you. Can you write me a list? So I'm going to offer to do the physical labor of going to the store and picking up things and putting them in a cart and paying for it. I'm offering to take that off your plate of the physical labor. However, if I'm asking you for a list, you're doing the cognitive labor. So then there's the emotional labor of, hey, you've called me eight times. I'm going to try to not be snarky in an asshole when you're asking me dumb questions. questions that if you had read the list more clearly or if you had actually had any awareness of

what food exists in our home that's feeding you, you wouldn't be asking me this question. One of the reasons that I wanted to have you on is because I feel like women are having these conversations. They are screaming about this. But especially as a female podcast host, I'm very aware of how much or how little men are willing to listen to women. So for the woman who is listening. Is there anything that women can do to have the man listen a little bit more when we're talking about these things? The place I start is literally just having it as a vocabulary that exists within your home. Example, if he comes home and he's stressed out about work and you're hearing him out and he's saying, you know, every time I go to have the salesman, the guy just brushes

me off and I feel like I have to do all this thinking, oh, it sounds like you do a lot of cognitive of labor for him. That moment when he's pointing it out in different dynamics. Yeah, because, you know, invisible labor doesn't exist just in the home. It exists everywhere. You know, I get hired by ERGs and companies to talk about invisible labor in their organizations. And that's most of the talk that I do is talking about, think about all of the different invisible labor that exists in your office. And, you know, for domestic labor, I pull up one of the clips from the office of Pam, putting the sign above the microwave saying, hey, can someone please clean this out? up and then Ryan weaponizing company and saying, oh, I'm the intern. Like, I would just mess it up

anyway. So domestic labor exists in corporate settings. Cognitive labor is just about all of what white color work is. And then if you look at like CEO level, you look at therapists, you look at couples counselors, the majority of their work is emotional labor. So if we can start calling it out what it looks like in a professional setting, specifically where a lot of men feel a lot of pride in what they do, I think that is a place like, oh, I do do do it. emotional labor. Wow, how about that? That's a word I didn't have for what I was doing before. When you have like especially maybe a high level executive that their whole job is making the customer happy. If you can be labeling for them, wow, it sounds like you do a lot of emotional

labor for that customer. No wonder you're tired. And then a month down the line when you're like, you know, I've been with our three-year-old for three days straight while you've been on the business trip. It's a lot of emotional labor. I have a hard time believing that they won't be able to hear that better. Do you think that men are much more likely to listen to another man saying this, though, versus a woman? Yes. And one thing that I've come to believe is that I think we take advice from people that look like us almost no matter what. I also think a lot of women are more likely to listen to you than to me about anything. I mean, I've been trying to convince my wife to be a content creator with me for years, but she starts changing after she's talked with a woman, not me. I do

agree with you for sure, men listen to more men. I also think a lot of people tend to listen to more people that look like them no matter what. I kind of defined emotional labor, invisible labor, mental load at the top of the episode, but I'd love to hear you say in a nutshell how you think of these concepts. I usually split into about four key concepts. So domestic labor is things you can physically see, also known as physical labor. If you were physically moving the books I see here on the shelf, physical labor, dusting things, physical labor. Still under the umbrella. Still under the umbrella of invisible labor, which is things that are either not valued or literally not seen and they're invisible. But they're usually things you can catch the act on camera.

Clerical labor, similarly, sometimes physical, but it's more like doing things digitally, putting, filling in credit card information in a form, filling out a Google form, filling out the school application for your kid, paying bills, clerical labor. It can often be caught on camera, just a little bit like it's the type of on keyboard, it's tapping on your phone. Cognitive labor, a lot of what white color jobs are for the most part. It's using your thinking brain, using more of your left brain. So it's scheduling, remembering, calculating. Okay, I got to be practice at eight. So I got to get the kids in the car by 745. I got to get them started fed 35 minutes before that. That brings me at 8.10.

And then emotional labor is when you're adjusting. your affect. It's like the way that you're presenting your emotions. So I'm doing the emotional labor right now from trying to not look a little nervous. My first in-person podcast here. Also, it's the considering of other people's emotions. I did this skit some years ago. If you're looking in the fridge for the ketchup, right? The physical aspect is like looking for the ketchup. The second aspect, okay, there's no ketchup. I'm thinking about what I need to do. I need to put it on the list. So there's the cognitive labor of thinking about it, knowing what brand it is. Like, the knowing and the awareness of it. And then there's the clerical labor of probably typing it

into your app to add it to the grocery list or writing it down on a list. Then there's the emotional labor of knowing, hey, on Saturday when we have hot dogs and hamburgers, my four-year-old's going to have a meltdown if they don't have the right Heinz flavor of ketchup. So the emotional thinking, and Leah Rappaner, she wrote the book, Drain. She's one of the top researchers in the world on Mental Load. She calls it the emotional thinking work that we do. So Mental Load is almost like a conglomeration of emotional and cognitive labor. And all of these have different levels of invisible and visible labor? Yes.

When I hear invisible labor, I think it's used interchangeably of like it's things that are either not seen or not valued or both. So some things are seen but not valued. Some things are valued but not seen. You could probably call invisible labor for all of them. Speak to the man listening. Why will their lives get better if they start doing more work? We're essentially asking men to do work that they have not been asked to

historically do. Why would they want to do that? So I'll start with this and the research isn't completely clear. Richard Petz out of Ball State University, they did a study on couples sharing the mental load during the pandemic. And they said that for families where she's owning it all, she's miserable, everyone's kind of miserable. However, when men start owning it, they noticed that there's an asymmetric relationship. So if he starts owning mental load, he's not more miserable. He's actually happier and she's happier and the whole family's happier. So I was saying why. And he said there wasn't like a clear answer to that, but I asked him a couple of different reasons. And Eve who's like, I think it's one or all three. So one is we're in a time where you're going to get a pat on the back

for low level things. So there's probably going to be more gratitude around the house. That's like, that's like a little level. I don't love that. Yeah. You're probably going to get more praise. some families where you've been behind for a long time, you might not be getting any praise. Second aspect for me that I've noticed since I started taking on more mental load is I just feel more pride in my own home. Like I'm walking around and I don't feel like I'm in my wife's house. I feel like I'm in my house. In our house, the past three years up until our twins are born four months ago and we just had a lot of grandparents support. I could probably count both hands, like how many times my wife did the dishes. I take a lot of pride in that. The fact that like she doesn't

have to think about it. She can just throw dishes in the sink. She knows. they're going to be clean the next day, like knowing that there is a whole operation in our home that doesn't run without me and or that I have to delegate to her like, hey, I'm going to be gone for a couple days. Just a reminder, the dishes are going to get piled up. And 10 a.m. seems to be the time that they just pile up because we're both snacking a ton of the morning. I'm hoping that's just not the pat on the backs and the praise that makes a difference. Just the amount of pride that I take and that I think a lot of guys want to take but don't realize it. And their home has been surprising.

I hate the term happy wife, happy life, but I think it is somewhat accurate is that if your wife is when I'm helping her meet her needs, either ahead of my own or parallel with my own or with the families, things are generally going better. I don't like that term because I do think that that term tends to add mental load for wife in the way that I originally thought of it. It's like on my wedding day, I remember hearing that and thinking, yeah, I'll let her have all of her preferences or as many as I can. What do you want for dinner, honey? I'll go wherever you want. I'll be whimsical. Do you want Chinese? Do you want Mexican? I'll go wherever you want. Great. We'll choose your preference and you get, to choose. And then over time, I believe that turns into you have to choose and that it turns into

just a persistent decision fatigue. So happy life, happy life in terms of like if you are owning things that historically default to your partner and she's just feeling better, like the whole mood of the house is likely to rise. That's so interesting. Okay, I want to read you a comment that I found on Reddit. At a recent event, all of the women were putting together our booth, arranging, decorating, organizing while all the men were standing on the other side. A woman passing by notice gave us men a disgusted look and walked off.

What she didn't see, though, was that the men had already done 99% of the heavy lifting, loading and unloading the trucks, carrying everything in, and setting up the big equipment. Once that part was done, we weren't hovering over the booth setup, the women had it covered. It made me think about invisible labor. Who really shoulders more of it? On one side, women often do tasks that get overlooked. Emotional labor, planning, coordination, keeping things running smoothly. On the other side, men often take on the physical work or financial labor that isn't always acknowledged as helping, especially in households. What would you say to the man who says, I'm actually doing a ton of invisible labor that my partner isn't noticing? I'd say prove it. One of the

activities that I have, my clients do is the 51% activity. It's similarity to Eve's Fairplay card deck. So you open up the cards, you look at all the responsibilities. And then you ask just who owns 51% of this thing. And each individual task. So like making dinner would be a task. Yeah. So I would say, I would say dinner in total. So that's the conception planning and execution. It might include groceries as well, potentially. But you could break that up however you want to. When Alyssa and I did the cards the first time, I think there were about 64 of them that belonged to our home in total. There are 50 of them that she had, and I had about 14 of them. Of the 14 ones that I owned, there are still large percentages that she owned of them.

So I was taking out the trash physically, 99% of time she was still often reminding me or checking, hey, did you do that? So she's still doing the emotional and the cognitive labor of making sure that it's happening. For somebody who's not familiar with the fair play framework or the fair play cards, can you explain that in brief? The Fairplay framework is, one, acknowledging that invisible labor exists, two, breaking that into conception, planning, execution. The way I kind of see is domestic, physical labor, cognitive labor, emotional labor, and then creating minimum standards of care, just like you would in a business setting, standard operating procedures. So let's take laundry is that's going to have the physical aspect of it, physically moving it from washer to dryer,

drier to the basket, folded, put back in drawers and hangers. That's your physical aspect. And then the cognitive is thinking about what needs to be done by when. Noticing that it's starting to pile up, probably need to get ahead of it. And then there's the emotional thinking of, let's see, I want to have this outfit ready for that. I want to make sure I don't shrink that one. So I'm going to put it off to the side. But I know that I'm going to forget it if I put it there.

So I'm going to make a sticky note to remind myself to do it. I know my wife has shrunk a couple of the things I have. It's the worst, too, because you're like, I appreciate that you did the laundry, but you ruined my favorite shirt. Right. So they're doing a lot of the physical and the cognitive labor, but maybe not the emotional labor to pay attention to it. Coming back to the Fair Play Framework, it's like creating a minimum standard of care or a standard operating procedure like you would in a business setting is like, okay, what's the expectation in our house? We have four different baskets. There's a white, there's a pink slash red, colored, and then there's like a dark black. The other aspect of fair play is that you silo ownership to one person.

So rather than having a breakup between conception planning and then execution being different sides, having that be one person owns all three of those. So in our house, like I have no shame about Alyssa owns all the laundry. She has no shame about I own all the dishes. So when you are siloing ownership of things, you know from beginning to end how it's going, and you just have a lot more awareness of how it works. So for the person listening who is like there is truly no way my partner would ever go through 65 cards and decide who owned what, what would you say to them?

One of the things that I am challenged with in the Fair Play method, I've been working on it for almost four years now, is it feels more like a North Star than it does a destination. Have you guys implemented Fair and Play at all? I saw the book on your shelf. Yeah, I love Eve. I've read the book. We've not actually sat down and divided up the cards.

Sure. So I think that when people go to do that, they're probably in a tough place. Not too many people break out those cards when they're like, yeah, we're in a good place. Let's just do a maintenance, like preventative care type exercise. Although it would be cool if you're like, I have friends who will do a round of couples therapy before moving in together, before having a kid. and I feel like here would be a great thing to do in those life transition moments. My job right now is talking with people when they've talked about separation or divorce. So a lot of my work is doing the emotional labor, validating both sides so that we can move the conversation forward.

What I would love for my job to be is talking to people before they have kids and starting those conversations and then having a couple coaching calls after the kids are there. That would be ideal because I think they would be in less chaos and less pain by the time they get to me. But people can book you. Oh, for sure. Okay. So if you're listening and you're thinking about having kids, book a session with Zach first. So last year, there was a moment.

It felt like an equilibrium of life had occurred. We had moved back into a smaller space to save money. We weren't expecting any babies. And it was like, okay, like it feels like we're at a calm state in life with a four-year-old. And I was taking over meal planning. I had not owned that really ever in our 10-year relationship. So what I coach people to do is have a, weekly meeting. I called the build meeting. Baseline routines, understanding, unpacking,

initiative taking, logistics and operations, and decision making and direction. We roll it out in different phases, but we were in the phase four where it's like you're doing more maintenance level stuff rather than the beginning stages of it. So we're consistently working on one or two cards at a time, one or two responsibilities at the time. And one of them was meal planning. It took about six or seven weeks for her to fully feel comfortable with me owning it. And like, okay, these are healthy enough meals, but like not burning ourselves out trying to do like hello fresh every night and like do a new thing all the time. And then a small season change where her daycare changed. And then all of a sudden, okay, well, we got to revamp the morning routine. Let's talk about

morning routine. So we talked about that for two weeks in a row. And it kept being a lot of moments of like, we're at equilibrium, but there keeps being these small, subtle season changes. I agree. You're probably not going to sit down and do all those. What I encourage people to do is just keep looking at what are the pain points that you're working on right now. If you did 20% of this, like you would feel 80% better. And then in the meeting, you talk about like what are our minimum standards for this thing, who's going to own this task? And then you check back in the next week and check back in the next week and check back in We have four-month-old twins right now, and so we've been in rapid response and change mode of the nighttime routine. So, like, recently they're at four months, for those that don't know, they usually go through both the sleep progression and they're capable of doing sleep training.

We just got rid of the bed inside of the nursery where I've been sleeping five feet from them for the last couple months. And now we're both going back into the same bedroom that we haven't been in the other for a while because pregnancy was brutal for Alyssa. And so now we're talking about, okay, what's our new standard operating procedure for doing this? And it's going to be, you know, at least a week or two before that hits an equilibrium. And then things will probably change again. Okay. So two for you. One, Zach, there's no way my partner's going to meet every week and talk about like dividing tasks or who owns tasks.

Or two, they're going to do it. But they're going to be kind of like pouty or annoying about it and not fully bought in. What do we do in those scenarios? So the first thing I would say is when I coach people, is like the men run that meeting. I encourage women to not really run that meeting, but for the men to run it, if they don't want to keep hearing like you don't carry the mental,

like, okay, run the meeting. I also know that that might be challenging for them to hear from this standpoint. What I would further say is it's more of an efficient way to have not fun conversation. So we were talking about Tim Ferriss earlier, and I remember the first time I heard him talk about a meeting like this. He's talking with Ramit Sethi about how they would have like,

weekly financial talks with their partners. And Tim was saying, like, I really don't like it when she just comes to me with like a criticism in the middle of my day. It's like, I was not ready for that. But what if you're receiving all your feedback in one place and you're prepared to receive it? One of the things that I encourage people to do when they're implementing the build meeting is have a time, location, send a calendar invite. Also have treats. If I know I'm going to have an uncomfortable conversation, but there's donuts, I'm showing up. I think if you can do a couple like biohacks almost on like showing up for it, I also encourage having it in an odd location for that time of week. So if we are typical on the couch on a early Saturday morning, don't be on the couch for

that meeting. How come? Because then you have a nonverbal communication of our meeting is about to start. I'd also add to that that when you're in the same location or the same routine, your brain goes into the default mode network and you're like less present and less likely to remember that conversation. So if you do it in a different environment, you are suddenly present to the conversation in a different way and you're going to be more likely to remember it and thus be able to implement it. Yeah. Okay. So to recap, one, kind of pitch it to them.

Say, here's the benefit to you. We're only going to talk about it during this one hour window of your week. You don't have to talk about it the rest of the week. Two, you get a treat. Three, maybe you'll feel some pride back to our earlier conversation and like owning this meeting if you want to run it. And then Ford do it in a different location. Yeah.

The guys that are coming to me, either because their wives encouraged them to book a call with me or they're coming to me on their own, most of them are like when they hear me talk about the building means, like this sounds great. Like 100% let's do this. And like the phases I encourage people to go through. One is just the habit setting of it because it's a little clunky. It's a little weird talking about your relationship or like your home like it's a business. So one is just getting the habit setting.

If I were a gym trainer in January, I would say to the person that is deciding new year, new me, like I'm going to go to the gym. I would say your only goal for January is to show up to the gym when you said you were. I don't care what you do once you get there. Just show up. You can go back home if you really want to, but just show up. Phase two is now we're going to work on talking about emotions. Because most of the time when we talk about those standard operating procedures and the dishes

and the laundry, there's always a lot of resentment underneath those things that people are not ready to talk about without exploding. So working on our emotional vocabulary, I've found that implementing emotional granularity has insanely improved our abilities to not get defensive and actually validate each other. Which is like, what are you actually feeling in this moment? Maybe you think you're feeling one thing. Could we provide a few alternative words for what you might be feeling? Yeah.

So, I mean, the first 10 years of our relationship, we would just use the word upset. I'm upset. Hi, I get why you're upset. that's not very balladating. Like if you were telling me, Zach, I'm upset because this thing happened. Oh, I go, I're upset. It just wouldn't hit the spot the way you want it to. But if you say I'm feeling anger, hurt, shame, guilt, fear, loneliness, sadness, and then sort of like inverse positive emotions. So we've built the habit. We've created space and worked on practicing emotional granularity. And then what's the next step in the process? Then you start working on the fair play cards, the standard operating

procedures. And you can do that without having the full set of cards. You can really just identify, like, what are the issues that keep coming up in our world, in our relationship. Yeah. And what I really encourage is for the guys to identify, what do you already own 80 plus percent of? I swear, every single couple, it seems to be trash and dishes. The guys own the majority of it. And there's just like a little last aspect of it that's still hers. So I want you to think about in your head, you have a bunch of chrome tabs open. If I open my laptop, couple of 30 of them open right now. Some of them are like four hour tasks and some of them are like two minute. I got to get back to this person. I'm leaving the tab open. A lot of the women in our lives,

they have all of their own tabs open that they own 100% or 90% of, but then they also have a bunch of tabs that are just the five and the 10 and the 20% left over from hours. It's like in our house, right? Laundry, she owns 100% of that. If I were coaching myself, I would not say, go take laundry off her plate because that is like that's a big task for me to to get all down on my belt instead if I'm owning 90% of dishes I want to X out of the tab and her brain that's 10% of the dishes so what does that last 10% look like that every time you get up off the couch around 8 o'clock and you're winding down and dinner's been eaten and you guys are about to head towards like a bedtime routine is it she's saying hey can you do the dishes or like hey you said

you're going to do dishes, can you get on that? Define what is it? Is it eight o'clock that he starts or has to start by 7.30 or else she's going to say something? So figure out what's the appropriate level of like she's not nagging me. She's like reminding me of my commitment at a certain time of night and then start working on building trust. And then I remember the very first time we went to implement fair play back in 2022. My first one is like, I'm going to own trash and dishes. Here's the 14 thing checklist that I am planning on owning. She laughed at me. She's like, there's no way that you're going to take on all that without me reminding you. My competitive spirit came out and I was like, all right, I see what I'm up against is the disagreement that I'm capable of any of this.

So two weeks later, I came back to her I said, I feel like I've done about a 99% job. Like, how has that been for you? She's like, wow, I actually haven't thought about it for two weeks. I hear from a lot of men who are like, I carry 100% of the mental load for our sexual life. Like, I am the only one ever initiating. So it's fair that she carries mental load elsewhere in our relationship. What would you say to them? Vanessa and Zander, I know, talk about mental load. The sex therapist.

They've been on the podcast number times. They often talk about how like carrying the mental load and being freed up enough that you can even think about being erotic or intimate. You have to have a space for that. So I would argue that if she is about to go to bed and you want to be intimate, which this was absolutely us, you know, a couple years ago, it still is sometimes. Just because now that we have three kids, it's a different game. But when she's going to bed and she's saying, I got to book that doctor's appointment and

all the dishes need to get done. I really need to deep clean the oven because that's gross. The heck are we going to do with all those peaches that just came off our tree. Oh, and I got to get back to my sister on the wedding and then you're rubbing up against her. She's like, sorry what? She doesn't want to be a part of that. So my encouragement is if she's feeling like she has a team partner and that she's not the only one shouldering all these things

and you're saying, hey, I saw the doctor's appointment, like I'm going to follow up with that. I know a huge moment for Alyssa. She carries a lot of shame when she's not showing up the way she wants to. I remember one time in 2024, I said, you're really stressed out like, why don't I take over laundry? And she kind of blurred it out. She's like, but then, like, no, you can't do that.

I would just be a bad wife. Sorry, what? What did you say, Alyssa? And she recognized that she saw that, like, her identity as a wife, as a mom, as a woman was negative if she was getting too much help doing things. And so I think there's some unpacking for her to do there. But overall, like, if she's dealing with a lot of these things and you're helping her relax, like, I know a lot of women, like, you're not going to be able to be intimate if you're

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when you start a subscription, plus a free shaker worth $25 on your phone. first order totaling $49 in savings. Go to purey.com slash Liz Moody and use code Liz Moody at checkout for this exclusive offer. You're going to get a discount on any of their products if you use code Liz Moody, but then this is an extra special offer. So go to puri.com and use code Liz Moody. I also heard from a lot of men who handle every single bill. They handle the insurance renewals. They handle the mortgage refinancing. They handle taxes. And they feel like that's a huge amount of mental load, even thinking about like, what is the financial future of our family, how are we going to

withstand AI changes and layoffs, et cetera, that does not get counted. How do you figure out what mental load counts is what? Like, I imagine finances is a bigger mental load than dishes. How do we decide what weight each thing gets? The metaphor that I would encourage you looking at is if you own a company, right? I was in sales for a while, and we had a sales department, we had an HR department, a finance department, a procurement department, customer success. If you look at the org chart of all the things that exist in there, I would say in a lot of ways, all those different departments see each other as somewhat equal. Do we think the finance department is that much more important than the HR or the sales department? When I heard that example that you're saying about how they

own a lot of finances. What I'm hearing is they own the insurance department. They own the finance department. They probably own sales because they're bringing money in. They're accountable for the accounting department. And then what are the departments she's owning simultaneously? Customer success. If those are your children, she's probably owning HR. Almost like break it out. So it's not just like finances. That feels heavier than dishes. You're like, well, what does finances actually include? And then it is heavier than dishes because you're like there's six separate departments to look at. Yeah. Every, Thanksgiving, I'll see at least one video of they're getting ready for guests to come over for Thanksgiving. And he's like out on the roof like with the leaf blower.

Bro, what are you doing up there? And while it looks obvious in the clip, like that's stupid, you don't need to be on the roof with a leaf blower or you don't need to be on the deck. Everyone's going to be inside in the inside. Why is he doing that? What's your guess? Because he thinks that's important for having people over. Yes, and he probably feels like he's going to get more judged on the exterior of your home and the affluence of like where you live than she is. And she's going to get judged on how the food comes out and the ambiance of the interior and a bunch of the other things that people are probably going to notice a little bit more specifically.

So I think we tend to overcorrect or over assume. that there's more mental load in like generically across things versus when we look at it from a little bit more gendered shame perspective like he's probably going to feel more judged if his family is not doing well financially she's going to feel more judged if the kids are not doing well and they're not happy and they're not emotionally regulated or you know looking at your family's backgrounds like if you grew up poor like that's going to sit differently than someone that grew up with more money in their home so what do we do about that is that just bringing a awareness to the wise behind these feelings.

Talking about those emotions. So like if he's consistently sitting and this is really heavy for me, it's because he's feeling a bunch of fear. It's feeling fear of sadness, fear of shame, fear of guilt that he's not providing the home that he wants. That's where like that emotional literacy, emotional granularity makes a huge difference in being able to deal with these problems. And that's why I really don't encourage people move on to talk about standard.

operating procedures until they have a decent feel for the emotions. Is there a way to get our partners to embrace that vulnerability in themselves if it's not, it doesn't come as naturally to them? I feel like constantly we're asking men to be like, be more emotionally available. And at the same time, I remember one time, Alyssa was like wincing at watching me cry. I think there's moments where we want men to be emotionally available and we want them to be vulnerable. And do we have all these micro moments where we don't have.

actually want them to be vulnerable, we want them to be strong and a product of the patriarchy. And I think it takes a lot of sitting in discomfort. And the moment that you see a guy cry for the first time is probably the biggest opportunity you have to stay a safe space and sit in that gooey moment with him. Like, I know there have been a handful of moments over the years where like if Alyssa had pushed me off, like we probably would have lost a year of trust off of it of me being vulnerable. So there are a lot of moments where I think Liz's nailed it and just like let me sit in discomfort together. But that one moment that you cried, she winced. And I feel myself in that, I think often

we talk about what the patriarchy has done to men and what it's done to prevent women from having the opportunities that we might want to have. But I don't think we talk that much about like, oh, I might even have these subconscious beliefs about what masculinity looks like in my head as a very feminist, very evolved woman. I think there's a lot of us that inherently know that we want to be more vulnerable. We want to talk about emotions. We're not given the tools from a cultural context, I think, for us to do that well. So our action step as women is to just create that safe space.

I mean, you guys do a shitload of emotional labor. So it's hard to ask that of you. For the most part, I think you guys are doing the lion's share of creating emotional safe spaces for people to do that. So I think that's asking a little too much. Like men have to step forward. If we're just saying, well, woman, you're not creating enough safe space for men.

That's not accurate. Like, we have to cultivate that ourselves if we want to climb our way out of the manosphere problem that we have right now. I also think that culture change is inherently uncomfortable on all sides. Like, it's going to be uncomfortable maybe for a man to feel shame or vulnerability when he doesn't feel like that's been allowed to him for a really long time. And maybe there will be some discomfort in witnessing that or squaring that with your ideas of a protector or somebody who's strong or somebody who takes care of you.

But I think that that discomfort is required to move society forward. If we're comfortable, we would just be doing the same thing we've been doing forever. Yeah. The direction we're going is the AI and data centers are taken over. And I know there's a bunch of people out there saying like the boys that are babies right now are going to end up with like AI girlfriends and stuff. So if we want to not have that future, us men. need to consistently work on showing up more vulnerably and in meeting the standards where they're

being asked. The comment that I both gristle at at the same time I know is so accurate is like the bar is in hell when you ask a single woman like, what do you want in a man? What makes a great guy or a great husband? They're just saying a bunch of qualities that like you would expect out of an average woman, which is like emotionally available, able to validate my feelings. Also like is capable of a career and bring in an income. Those are all things that most women are expected to do. That's interesting. I also saw a social media post recently where it said to ask a man what he loves in a woman or his partner and he would describe things about how she makes him feel. But if you ask a woman what she loves in her partner, she'll describe unique attributes about that person. So like if you ask a woman what she loves about her male partner, this is in heterosexual relationships, she'll say he's kind, he's loving, he's funny. And if you ask a man, he will often say she makes me. me feel strong. She makes me feel seen. She makes me feel taken care of. If I already hear that question, I would be like, oh, that's not the right answer to say. But I would hope.

It's not a trap. I would hope for sure, like, before hearing that, that I would answer differently. My wife recently was published in the New England Journal of Medicine for the work she's doing in her leukemia research. The New York Times article I knew was coming out. And I was like, I want to make sure we acknowledge her career too. And that. So I got her like a frame of like, all the work she's done on her leukemia team. And there was like a, it's called the paradigm study. So like I made sure to champion that because I know that that is more important than just my main character energy soaking up, you know, the emotional labor that she does for me.

It also feels like a lot of the issues that people have around mental load, even if or even especially if they know what it is. They're like, I'm ready to implement it. Is it up to one partner to accommodate what a. another partner thinks needs to be done, even if they disagree. A lot of people ask me, like, how do I know if my standards are too high or if his are too low? Getting back to emotions, I encourage, like, what's the underlying emotion for you around it? I know for me, she was asking me to wipe down the counters before I went to bed.

And I was like, it's dark out, really just want to go to bed. I've done the dishes. I just ran the dishwasher. I don't want to have to take another 45 seconds to clean that. The emotion that was showing up for me was anger. And furthermore, when I typically look at anger with people, I encourage them to look, see if there's something underneath anger. Yes, anger is a primary emotion, but a lot of people say it's also a secondary. I operate as if it's almost always a secondary emotion. And I saw it was hurt. It was hurt that I felt like I didn't need to be doing that, which I think comes back to, it's like it's a feminized skill where it's something that I don't think is worth my time.

Meanwhile, she walks down and when she sees splatter marks or grease or whatever, like that her nervous system is uncomfortable inside of that. Part of that might be shame for her because she grew up in a very clean home with a stay-at-home mom. And so when anger is the thing that's running, oftentimes I realize that's probably where I need to step it up. If shame is the thing running her, I encourage her to see what it would be like if it were lower. I think whenever we can look at the emotions that are showing up, when we're being asked,

to change our standards, that is a great pointer to see, like, what's running the show. I love that. Okay. I want to play a little game. It's called mental load or preference, and I'm going to share a bunch of scenarios, and you can tell me whether you think that their preferences or their true parts of a mental load. A couple is deciding where to go out for dinner.

One partner wants both people to go through all of the menus and find the best place, and the other partner says they don't care where they go out for dinner. The first person is hurt because they feel like they're being asked to shoulder the load of picking the best place. The other person says, yes, but this does not matter to me. Is this a mental load or a preference? Can I give it like a third response? Yeah, you can say whatever you want for any of these.

So I'm going to give a similar one, which I know it's probably not going to be the rapid fire version that you wanted. When we were looking at paint chips back about a year ago, at first I thought to myself, I don't care. It's going to be her choice anyway. She's going to have the stronger opinion no matter what. And I had this moment of like, if I were making a big choice, for our family. It would feel lonely to me if I were the only one making a choice about it.

So again, back to the motions, right? And noticing lonely. So I said, like, whether she's going to listen to me or not, I'm going to have a preference. So I thought to myself, okay, which one do I want? I wanted the brighter one. So when she came to me inevitably and said, which one do you like? And I'm saying, I know you probably aren't going to actually take this into account. I have thought about this. This is the one I like and this is why I like it. The way that she responded, she was so surprised because historically I've been that guy that's like I don't care. I literally am the guy that goes to the restaurant and says the waitress like give me what's good. I don't care. I'll eat it. I don't want to think about it. You're asking a waitress to do your mental load. That's right. And sometimes I'll say I like

meat. I like spicy. That's like the criteria I'll give you on both sides. I think there's some preference, but there's also some mental load. I'm assuming it's him. This one is actually, so these are all real examples, this one's actually gender flipped. So this was a woman who was just like, I just don't care where we go out to dinner. And the man kept being like, oh, but can you like, look at this place and this place and this place. And he felt like he was being asked to do a lot of extra labor. I think it's not a requirement for dinner. I think there is mental to it and maybe say, how about over the next month, if we go four times, I'll choose who you choose to. What if it's a thing that one person truly cares about and the other person doesn't like,

let's say the person who's wanting the other person to join in on the menu looking, that person's like a foodie and they love picking out restaurants and the other person, like, that is not a joy of theirs at all. Can you say like, look, this is your joy? You actually do care about this thing. I don't care. This can be your area. I like that and I would say the other person ought to identify what the emotions are for them

and saying like, oh, let's say, why do I care about you having a preference about this? I really care just because it feels lonely when I'm the only one that chooses. I feel a little sad that you also don't care about this with me. To my example, it's like if they really do just get joy out of it, do I need to join in on that for them to get the joy. And maybe I do. Maybe it is like I love this and I want to share it with you. So it could be that you choose to do the cognitive labor of jumping in on the decision

fatigue of choosing a menu or you do the emotional labor of saying, hey, what's going on for you? what's on your emotional dashboard there and being, like, committing to validating some of the emotions that they feel about having them be a part of it. Okay. I have another quick fire for you. Mental load or preference. One partner says the house is dusty and she is the only one who ever notices.

The other says he genuinely does not see it. And if he did notice, he would clean it. But he's not going to start scanning surfaces for dust that he does not perceive as a problem. Is that a mental load or a preference? I'm going to say it's a mental load because I've been. that guy. I've been semi-unwilling to do certain levels of domestic labor. And at some point, I realized, one, I'm an asshole for not being willing to do it and throwing a fit all the time. And at some point, I knew that I needed to do some of that labor, at least so I could appreciate

where she was coming from. For a while, I was just like, it doesn't need to be dust around it. I don't even see anything. But you know what? I'll grab a Swiffer and see what, see what shows up on the rag. After we'd committed to doing her standard for, it was like a month, I started seeing things differently because I was in the weeds. I was in the dust of it. After that, I was like, I think I earned my right at that point to say, you know, I dusted this last week. It doesn't need another dusting a week later, maybe two weeks later. And so like I had to earn, earn my stripes almost to be able to even have the ability to like say whether it was ridiculous or not for her to ask that of me? Because that's what it felt often like, because this is ridiculous.

Why you ask him to do this? It didn't even feel fair for me to say that without having had done the work. And also, I feel like all the time it would happen where she would ask for something. And then I would say, like, can we just hire that out? You go, cool, you've been doing it all this time, Alyssa. But the moment you ask me to do it, it's worth our money for me to not do it. And that felt really telling when I caught myself doing that one day. Oh, that's so interesting. Registration opens in January, and the good camps all fill up really quickly. She's been tracking it since November. He says that if they miss it, the kid will survive a summer without going to camp,

and that would be fine, mental load or preference. I would say mental load and or, okay, if you don't want to manage that, you're responsible for making sure the iPads charge every day and dealing when they have temper tantrums because they're on screen time all day. she's doing the mental load of trying to have a positive experience that makes a well-rounded young adult versus you're willing to just let it default. But what's the default is that default needs to be you if we're talking about child care? She books doctors visits for the whole family, including him. This one speaks to me. This isn't even like partners. I do this for my dad.

I feel like the eldest daughter pipeline of mental load is like strong. He says that he never asked her to and he says that he would book his own if she left it alone. She does not want to leave it alone because he does not book his own. And she cares about him living a long time since that impacts her life and her happiness. Mental load of preference. Oh, that's brutal. Yeah. That one's so hard because we know statistically it will fall on to her if he doesn't take

care of himself. And we know statistically men with daughters live longer. We know that men with partners live longer. Women are literally out there keeping men alive. And then when they're like, well, okay, I'll back off. the guys like, I'll do it myself. And it's like, well, you don't. And then you die. And then I'm fucking sad. I think the other stat is, I'm going to get the specific number wrong, but it's after husbands die in old age, women live longer afterwards. Oh, because we're not taking care of them.

Yeah. Then the length of time that men live after their wives die. That makes complete sense. Yeah. So what do we do about that? Is that a mental load? Is that a preference? Like, what do we do in that situation? I mean, I think it's for sure a mental load because, one of the things they encourage my clients do is try to start with if you're having a hard time handing off mental load to something that he's saying like, look, I can do this, but you know it's a glass ball that shatters when it falls. Try to find some rubber balls to drop first and let him do like trash. Like we're not, we're not going to be in huge pain if I drop the ball in that. It might be smelly. It might gather in the garage where we don't want it to, but like

there's a way that that can fall on me versus that one clearly, especially if he has any kind of health condition, that's going to fall onto her to be the, she is the default that picks up all the pieces when they shatter. So maybe literally give up every other card you can before you give up this card. Maybe add another aspect to it. So oftentimes like when I'm encouraging the guys to run the build meeting and, you know, if I'm working with a couple and she's saying, look, he hasn't written a build meeting for like two months. We've all been working together. He hasn't ran one. Then we'll add another anti-incentia. If you don't do something, then money gets donated to like something that you don't agree with. I use this hacking for myself all the time. When I was in sales,

I had an accountability group that we were doing 120 cold calls a day and we had to pay a dollar per dial we didn't do. And while I owed $300 by the end of the month, that was the number one sales route because I was doing an average of like 120 a day. Wow. And that same group, we don't do dials anymore, but we find other things. I read my manifest to myself out loud every day, twice a day. and I owe them $10 by the end of the week for every one I don't do under 14. So similarly with the doctor's appointment thing, I would say, cool, you can own it. I get a hotel room to myself for X amount of days. Every day after this date that you don't book it, I would probably introduce one of those, like, anti-incentives.

She wants a themed party with handmade invitations. He wants pizza in the backyard. She says she's not going to be the mom whose kid got the sad party. He says nobody's judging them. and she's inventing an audience. Mental load or preference. I do think there's some level of preference in there. I would, one, talk to the kid.

I would see, like, what are their preferences? As the kid, what they want for their party. I mean, it's certainly a little dangerous, but... Dinosaurs, real ones. I guess it also depends what age we're talking here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know for sure this has been a place where Alyssa and I have, like, disagreed. It worked out really well this year is we had one for the family.

We went three hours down to where the grandparents were. and then she managed that one, and then I managed the one up in our current village with her classmates and stuff. And it was a potluck and we had pizza. I do think there's preference around it. I also think that, I mean, if you're raising a decently humble kid, I think they'll be okay with something a little bit lower.

But I know for sure, like in our state, like the standard of what a party looked like amongst the kid's friends was kind of high. It makes me think of what you were saying with Thanksgiving. where society's more likely to judge the mom if it's a more low-key party or it doesn't have these certain elements that are considered normal in parties these days and not the dad. So of course, she's going to have more of a reaction and be more afraid of that judgment. It's almost like understanding and making sense of the situation we're all in and then going

from that accepted reality. Yeah. And we could also respond to that one a little bit to where we did the dusting where it's like, okay, run a theme party the way I run it. And then I'll give you permission the next couple of years where you can run your version of a party at a minimum so you can appreciate the amount of thought and effort that I put into it. The amount of money that we spent in effort, she put into our kids' first birthday party that she isn't going to remember. But, you know, the family and the friends will. I remember

being so uncomfortable with, like, how much money are we spending on this? And she's like, you've literally never organized a birthday party. You don't even know what things cost. Like, you don't know that food is going to cost, like, probably one to $200. I'm like, what? And, like, the fact that like I actually had no concept of how much it was going to cost was like that was a really good learning experience for me. I do think you can't do this in every scenario, but it can be fun to A, B, test. Like to be like, this year we'll do the birthday party exactly as you want to do it. Next year we'll do the birthday party exactly as I'd want to do it. And like let's see how both of those feel and report back. I think that's interesting. It can feel often like a glass ball,

which is like your kid's feelings. I know it would suck. Like if if dad just dropped the ball and like the pizza was cold and, you know, it just felt really half-assed. So I can get where it feels like a glass ball. I would also say kids are pretty darn resilient. Okay. Last one. Her mother's coming to visit and the house is absolutely trashed. He says it's fine and that it's family. She gets annoyed that he won't help clean. He says that keeping the house clean has far more to do with her relationship with her mother than the true state of the house. Is that mental load of preference? I can't tell you how much this heads home. I think it's worth emotionally unpacking. And like, getting into the emotions of it. I know for sure when my mom comes over that she cleans and my mom always

says to her like, you didn't have to do that for us for me. And my wife's like, no, this is for me. Like I, this is part of my identity, part of my pride in hosting. She wants it to be somewhat of a hotel like experience because her parents have had such a high bar for her. The third answer for all them is emotionally unpack both of them and see whether it's anger or whether it's shame and if that can be a guiding principle towards which one we look at. So I think all of them are valid mental loads worth emotionally validating. Okay, this is from Reddit. In my experience, having been married, a lot of women tend to create a sort of unsaid schedule in their head and then become stressed or overwhelmed when the day turns out differently than the way that they had hoped

it would. For a lot of men, myself included, running a household is more relaxed and problems are solved as they arise. We aren't doing brain surgery or diffusing a bomb. We're doing laundry and mowing the grass. I think a lot of women who complain about mental load are actually describing pretty bad neuroticism as a result of trying to live up to some Pinterest mommy blogger fantasy where everything is always overly organized meticulously clean. Is a lot of mental load about living up to a fantasy about how life is supposed to look? What I don't like, about that question first is that it is a man not attempting to look at the lens that she's experiencing through. If you go on my Instagram search, you're going to see 1990s novelty

clips. You're going to see sports clips. I almost guarantee if you go on to my wife or most other moms that follow me, half of it's like relationship advice and interior design and like kids' ideas and how to do better emotional labor for your kid. So the start off of that question, there was like an unwillingness to consider her experience in the environment that she has. And there's just a lot of empathy, I think, missing from that question. A huge part of identifying and having the vocabulary of invisible labor

is so that we can have the empathy to appreciate why it feels so heavy when there is a ton of mental load on you. Yes, I think there is a ton of cultural norms. that are being lived up to and require a good amount of emotional unpacking. But if you're not going to do the cognitive labor, if you're not going to do the physical labor of doing those things, you've got to be willing to do the emotional labor of unpacking and validating those experiences.

So there are moments where I'm annoyed that Alyssa wants to do the level of cleaning that we want to do. But if I'm not to do the physical and cognitive labor, I'm at least going to be able to say like, hey, I feel like you're really stressed about this. I'm getting kind of stressed out about this because it's a lot of work that we can't fit in a lot of period in a small period of time.

You can pause for like 10 minutes to talk through emotions. And that's a huge reason why I teach my clients to go through that emotional dashboard fast. There's sad, joy, hurt, love, loneliness, connectedness, fear, confidence, guilt, gratitude, shame, pride, and then anger. So for this question, it's like maybe I'm not willing to approach the household in the way that the woman wants to. But I could sit down with her and unpack why she wants to live up to some Pinterest mommy blogger fantasy. Like what is this doing to emotionally?

I don't think they're going for a mommy vlogger fantasy for the most part. I think it's that they feel like that is the bar that they're not meeting. I think a lot of women experience with the social media algorithms that are, making our lives all miserable, I think it's much more of a standard that they don't feel like they're hitting more so than like, yeah, we're doing okay, but we can do great. This is another question from Reddit, and it's sort of revolving around this same, what is a preference and what is a need conversation? And I just want to talk about this a lot because I do think a lot of the mental load conversation comes down to, like, why am I trying to meet a need

I do not personally have? And so this is another example of that. Two years after my divorce, my home is spick and span. This made me realize that it was not me being irresponsible that caused my ex-wife's mental load, but my ex-wife's expectation on me being able to read her mind when she wanted things to be done. I was perfectly capable of doing every single chore, and I would have done more than my fair share when I needed to, but there was no way that I could consistently anticipate her needs and when she wanted things to be done. Women aren't asking for a partner to share a burden with. They're asking for a servant to anticipate their needs. What's your reaction to that? To me, that they were probably not great at having boring conversations.

So those standard operating procedures and saying, like, if at some point I was getting annoyed with Alyssa, like, hey, I feel like every night at 8 o'clock you say, you're going to do the dishes. Like, how about if I don't start them by 815, you're allowed to call me out on it? Like, it occurs to me, one, they're probably in too much of an emotional heightened state to be able to have that conversation. But, like, I think that is probably the missing conversation. on a consistent basis, and it's like a willingness to look at your home as an organization,

not just as this like romantic, romantic experience of like, oh, we love each other and we do things for each other. When we start looking at it more as a business and like as a functional organization that thrives on certain things, like you're able to have so many more of those conversations. I got a very detailed text from your assistant. I was fully aware of what was going on to show up today. And I'm sure you've had one or more conversations. Hey, can we add this sentence? But you're really comfortable in an organizational setting to say, hey, let's add this to the text. Can we have that at home too? Hey, I recognize that every night, it seems like you're on me about X, Y, and Z things. Like, can we talk about how can I communicate to you that I'm thinking about

them so that you don't feel the need to come to me saying that I'm on the short end of the stick here, that I'm coming short. Do people literally like write these things down? Like do you have a standard operating procedure for dishes, for kids, for all these things, like written down? Some things I do some things we don't. So in our build meeting agenda, it's in a Google Doc. If there's something from last meeting that was like an action item, we'll keep it up and

say whether it got checked off or not or give an update for meal planning, that was a the whole document of like, here's the template of what the week looks like. Here's the adjustments for making that template. I've been drinking Element every single day for literally years. I usually use one packet a day, but I break it up and I kind of spike my water throughout the day. So it makes my water taste amazing and it helps me stay consistently hydrated, which for me means more energy, fewer headaches, and way clearer thinking.

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chrissons for life when you visit wildgrain.com slash Liz Moody or use promo code Liz Moody at checkout. What are women doing wrong when it comes to mental load? We're hearing from these men who are like, I feel like she's a princess. I could do this fine on my own. How are women approaching this conversation in a way that's maybe eliciting these types of reactions that they could change? Rather than saying what they're doing wrong, I'm going to say what I've really appreciated Alyssa has done for me over the years on these things.

So one, I think we've gotten more liberal with gratitude while there have been some moments which is like, I'm not thanking you for doing these things. That's stupid. I've been doing them silently, quietly, invisibly for years. You don't need a pat on the back and I'm not giving you one asshole. That has been one thing that she's gone back and forth on

and shifted. And I think when we've been willing to both have gratitude and oftentimes it's got to come from me, it's like if I want to have more gratitude for the invisible labor I'm doing the mental load that I'm holding, like I need to acknowledge her first because I know for sure she's had more of it over the years. And so I have a decent amount of gratitude debt to pay first to hear it.

So I'd say gratitude's one great place that I know that she's shifted on. There have been definitely some moments where she's done unpacking on her motions and talking and acknowledging shame. I remember last year I was running bath time and it was three nights in a row. I just got like one small thing down wrong. Like one was like ended up getting into a disagreement with my. three and a half year old, one was water was all over the floor. One thing was I didn't put the book out ahead of time so it ended up turning into like a 15 minute deciding factor of which book we were

going to read and then we went like 30 minutes past the normal bedtime. And then the fourth night, I did it all right. And the first three nights, we went to bed and she was like, I was so fucking annoyed with, like she was angry with me. And I had a lot of validating to do. The fourth night, she was still mad at me. And she didn't tell me this until a couple of days later. She's like, oh shit. Like he didn't do anything. Why am I still so angry? And she realized that it was, she felt shame that if she was getting this level of help, that she was a bad mom, she was a bad woman. So coming back to that, what are those like cultural scripts that you're running through your heads that I am a bad, insert identity.

What are the reasons that you're giving yourself for why that's true? A common thing that I hear from women is that their partners just don't do tasks very well. They don't clean well. They're taking on child care, but they're missing key steps. I do think that part of the problem here is that women have been socialized for decades to find the specific problems in these situations and find specific solutions for them. How can we make it so that men, notice those problems and know the solutions for them and almost like exercise the skill set

when women have been exercising it for decades. I think the more opportunities I've had to fail the better. I remember the first time I think Lisa left for like six days. I was like, all right, this is an opportunity for me to see where I don't show up and our home runs differently when she's not the engine. And like I noticed bedtime was a little bit later, probably by 15, 20 minutes every night. And then I tightened it up in the second half of the week. The other two ones were like the cat dish for the water didn't get replaced and got gross. And I was like, oh, she does that 100% of time.

And the other one I noticed was that the Swiffer vacuum that we had wasn't getting plugged back in after I used it. There were a lot of opportunities that she's given me to just be solo. I remember another big moment was 23. She left for two days and our kid was sick. and like historically she would have just canceled her plans like up she's sick I need to stay home but she's like no like I trust you and I remember it was a big deal for me when she didn't call to say hey how are you doing with her how is she doing like it's her temperatures like she wasn't checking in on me on all the things she trusted me now I could also see where if I had fumbled that

quite a bit in or more in the previous months like that would have been harder for her to do but her willingness to like let me fail or like let me experience some things and drop some balls that she hoped didn't shatter like that made a huge difference for me. So do you think that the solution for weaponized incompetency is to remove yourself from the situation for a little bit? You didn't say weaponized incompetence. So weaponizing competence is a different animal. So when I think of weaponized incompetence, I think of it like first degree murder. So like first degree murder, right? They have intent of video where like I can see this guy's face.

he's such an asshole. He's like, guys, this is how you get out of doing chores every time. And then he, like, actively use a dish soap instead of dishwasher soap and, like, just cuds the whole kitchen. He's, oh, man, like, you're just so much better at this and I. That is weaponizing competence. You're actively pretending to be incompetent to get out of something. I think that is a very different beast. So, like, someone that's, like, drunk driving that kills someone, they're not going home saying, I'm going to kill someone on the way home. They're saying, I'm too lazy to call an Uber. I don't want to deal with getting my car in the morning.

I'm going to just, I'm fine. I'm tipsy. Like, I'll get home fine. They're not aiming to kill anybody that night. And so what I call that is selfish negligence. I think there's tons of guys, including myself, that have been selfishly negligent over the years where they're like, I don't want to go deal with our kid.

I'm just going to deal with, like, them not want to eat their food. I'm just getting pizza tonight because I know I'll delete that. I'm just going to give them fruit loops. I'm just going to let them. them have another hour of screen time because I'm too lazy to be the parent that my wife is. And then when they consistently don't do that, that's where the lines get blurred, where it's like, if you cared, you would change. And I've also gone through that. I don't think I've ever weaponized incompetence. I've been chronically negligent and selfish. Why is that distinction important?

Because to use your metaphorical example, somebody is dead in both scenarios. Why does it matter what the intent was? From a legal perspective, we prosecute them. differently, right? We do. Yeah, but you're serving a lot of time in prison. And so similarly, in a relationship status, like if someone is being manipulative, get out of that relationship quick versus selfishly negligent. That for sure has been me. Like, I've learned and I've been able to unpack like, oh, yeah, that was really selfish. Like, I don't actually want to be that person versus the weaponizing competence person. Like, they actively don't respect their partner. And they are manipulating them to have them do things and pretending that they're incompetent.

That, like, that feels like a different level of crazy to me. Another thing that I hear from women all the time is that their partners are just slower than they would like. Like, they're slower to take agency. They're slower to take action. They're slower to get things completed. Is there a secret to making our partners move faster? The reverse side of that coin is, like, if he's saying, oh, she's nagging me,

what I encourage men to do if they're saying, like, Oh, she won't stop nagging me. And say, okay, say when you'll do something by. So if I say I'll do this thing by 6 o'clock, but you come to me at 540 and say, hey, it's not done yet. Hey, well, I said I was going to do it by 6. Like, I will do it by 6. Versus if they come to you at 620 and say, hey, you've done that thing, you're just

holding them accountable. And I know that this is tough for some guys to hear, but it's like, okay, by when will you do that? Like, force them to do what they would do in a business and a career setting. Like, if you said to your boss, hey, I'll get their report done by the end of today, you would probably put a calendar block because you don't want to answer emails and you know it's going to take you half an hour to do it. I know that if I'm promising someone to do something, like, and there's a lot of money online or my pride is on the line or something, I'm going to set up

an alarm, like reminder, a sticky note calendar event to do the thing. So I think encouraging and or pushing your partner to use the same things that they do in their career to be effective. I have ADHD, but it annoys me when I hear guys say, well, I can't have ADHD. Well, what do you do for your job? Well, I'm a project manager. Okay. You figured it out there. Why can't you figure it out here?

Because you don't respect the work. I was going to ask you by ADHD because I have heard from many people who aren't sure how much they can ask of their partner because their partner has ADHD or they themselves have ADHD and they're like, you can't expect me to function at this level. Do you have anything else you would say to either of those people? There are some people that I say, what do you do for a career? And they're like, well, I do this thing because my ADHD can run rampant and I'm fine. And like when I look at my content creation strategy, if you guys have seen me, like, most of it is point and shoot and just talking ahead, like me coming up with something like, oh, this just happened with Alyssa.

Oh, I got 15 minutes before my next call. I want to make a video right now. And it's not curated and it's not well scripted. But you have managed to create a coaching career. I bet you're not missing a single coaching session because you're so disorganized or whatever. I've missed one or two over the years, but for the most part, I figured out how to do it as a teacher. I figured out how to do it. And in my sales career, I figured out how to do it as a coach.

I know that calendar events work for me. I know that setting alarms, not reminders, works for me. I know sometimes a Post-it note is going to work for me. I think it hurt my shoulder and I went to PT. So I put it right above the coffee machine while I'm waiting for it to brew. I do my little shoulder motions. There are also a ton of guys that come to me and say, I have ADHD. I'm like, great, we will figure that out.

We're going to use and leverage all the skills you use in your career. And part of that's going to be going into the build meeting. And like, how would you prep for a meeting with your boss at work? You're going to do the same thing that you do for your relationship. This is from a listener. My husband refuses to do things that he doesn't want to do. If our kid is up crying at 6 a.m. and he doesn't want to wake up, he just won't get up. And I end up doing it.

He says, the baby is fine. when he's crying. So if I want to go do something about it, it's my choice. I love him in every other way, and he's a great partner. But what do you do in a situation where your partner just will not compromise, but you have a great life together otherwise? I mean, my first question for this person, when's the last time he took a multi-day vacation so that he can experience what it's like to like, are you just going to let him cry and have him deal with whatever pain that is? When we had our firstborn, there was a blowout diaper. It was my first or second one. and Alyssa had been doing, I think, all of the blowout diapers,

there was a lot of mom guilt, a lot of mom shame. And I remember at one point, I beat her on the pull to go work on the diaper. I was like, oh boy, it's a blowout. And then she came, she literally tried pushing me out. I was like, nope, you can calm her, you can be with her, you can try to soothe her. I am changing this diaper woman. And like, I put my foot down. I was like, I need to do this for myself.

And I get that they're going to cry. and I know that's painful for you. I'm sorry. I'm going to take the time I need to. I'm going to try to be quick. I'm not going to try to go slow. But like, I need this experience for myself. So if you need to find a way to force him having those experiences,

I would encourage taking a multi-day vacation somewhere where he's forced to figure it out. You take the vacation by yourself. So he is solely responsible for the child. That would be my encouragement. I think there's a greater question here that I hear from a lot of listeners, which is my partner is so great in every other way. I love them. I'm happy in my relationship.

And they just will not budge on this stuff. They're not going to do the cards. They're not going to do the meeting. And they say that, like, I care about this thing and they don't care about it. So why should they have to spend their mental and physical energy doing it? How much of a deal breaker do you think this carrying of the mental is in a relationship that's otherwise good? Do you receive the breakup with Vince Vaughn and Jeffrey Nist? And they're talking about, she's like, I want to go to the ballet.

He's like, I don't care. I don't want to go to the ballet. She's like, do you think I like baseball? You think I like going to baseball games with you? And he's like, I don't know. I never really thought about it. Is there something that Zach does for you that he doesn't particularly love, but he'll do it because he loves you?

Yeah, there's like 50 things. Sir. So if he does it in that area of life, why can't he do it in another area of life? And furthermore, I would ask, like, if that is the one thing, I hate to say this. Like, what are you willing to deal with this 20 years down the line? If he's still not budging, like, are you going to lose your mind? Like, are you going to pull your hair out?

How is that going to reverberate into the other areas of relationship? And I know I hate to say it that, you know, my wife and I were separated in 2018 because we got a rental house. I was obsessed with my little 2,000 subscriber YouTube channel at the time of personal development content. Meanwhile, we had a whole house that had no renters. in it. We're in the middle of a renovation project. And I was focused on that. And she's like, now I have two full-time jobs. One as a project manager for this house and my regular job.

And you're treating this YouTube fantasy like it's a full-time job. Like something's got to give. It became like it's mere YouTube. It was her being willing to put her foot down and say like, long-term, this is unsustainable. I decline to believe that this is going to be my future forever. We went through a three-month separation and we said, you know, we'll come. back to the drawing table, October 4th, and we did boundary settings where you got to follow through. I think you either have to figure out how to make the piece or you have to figure out how to take the steps to have a different life and have. You do the emotional labor of setting a really painful and scary boundary that you might need to. I want you to speak directly to men out there

who might not be doing their share of the mental load. I want you to just speak to him for a second. like meet him where he's at, tell him what maybe his partner wishes that he would hear that is not getting through to him when she is saying it. My friend, you are doing more than what your dad did. You're doing more than what your grandfather did. You are probably going through the do better loop, which I describe as a moment where it feels like she's lost her mind on you over a spoon in the sink. and then you're like, no, no, no, I can do better.

Like, that was a little crazy. That was, that was more than I was expecting out of a spoon and sink. But I kind of see where she's coming from. I'm going to do better. And so you put, you put your foot to the gas. You're trying extra hard. And all of a sudden, the arguments seem to go away. And over whether it's three days or three months, things seem to get a bit better.

The problem is, while you're doing that, you're also slowly taking your foot off the gas. because the arguments are your barometer for whether things are going okay. Furthermore, as you take your foot off the gas, you're like, ooh, I can breathe. Like, I don't have to keep my foot on the gas. She's slowly building resentment because there was a certain level of defensiveness that you put in, you didn't intentionally do it. You weren't given the skills culturally as a young child to talk about your emotions in this way. So you're getting defensive.

And so when she slowly starts building this resentment, it's going to come to another head where you forget to change the laundry and it's sitting there for four hours and needs to get redone. So it's going to be something that you're going to keep getting stuck in that loop. You want to cut that loop a bit shorter. And so, you know, what I work with with is having that build meeting. You're going to be able to get ahead of her on the mental load in a lot of different areas of your life. It might not feel that way. And I can see why because I asked Alyssa, you know, at some point she was just so annoyed that we're having the meeting in the first place. She was like, yeah, dude, I've been thinking about these things the last two months.

This is new to you. And at some point, we tried Sunday nights and it wasn't working out. Like two months went by. We didn't have a meeting. She's like, you know, I feel kind of hurt. We haven't had a meeting. And I was like, you hated them. She's like, but you caught up.

And it was really nice to have a partner in hearing your thinking on things and being on the same level with you. The first time I heard that was like so affirming that I knew I've been capable all the time to manage these things. and it took a lot of emotional practice for us to be able to communicate well about them. And you've been ill-equipped from K through 12 and the cultural program that we've received

from the Ray Romanos of the world and the Homer Simpson. Like, we've not had good role models growing up. And so I really encourage that if you can embrace that you are more than the role models that you're given and that you're totally capable of, the bar that your wife would totally love for you to be at. You're just so, so capable of it.

I want you to speak directly to the man who thinks that the concept of mental load is overblown. It's something that their wife has been brainwashed into believing via TikTok or Instagram. Speak to him directly. I'm assuming you, sir, have a job. And I guarantee you have mental load at work. It just sounds and looks different and probably feels a little bit different. So the pride that you have and the work that you do, the attention to detail that you do, in the way that you receive respect from your colleagues for the work that you do is because you carry the mental load of something,

whether it's the students that you teach or the business that you bring in, the sales that you bring in the money that you help manage for the company, the customer success that you help, all the things that you do to bring to the company that you work for is because you manage the mental load in that way. So I promise you that if you're willing to consider that you own the mental load, and it's probably a mixture of physical labor, clerical labor, cognitive labor, emotional labor. If you can break down what those things are that look like in your job, I guarantee you I can

show you a parallel set of skills that exist in running a home. And if both you and your partner where both are or we're both working, I guarantee that the nanny that you hire or a person that you might want to manage the house, they would have to have that same skill set. Do you think that the amount of mental load that each person should handle should change it all based on who makes more money or whose job is more energetically intensive? We'll take like a stay-at-home mom example. So let's say he's the main and only breadwinner and she is taking on the job of parenting, but also all of the domestic labor needs around the home. If you were to substitute in the stay-at-home momness of it for a nanny, so you had someone there 40 hours a week so that she, She could go do a job, either replace or less or more than the required income to have a nanny. Then ask yourself, okay, who takes on the rest of the laundry and the domestic labor and the appointments for the kids?

Does the nanny do that? Anything that falls outside of that nanny's responsibilities should be shared. What about if one partner makes like 200K and one partner makes 60K, but both people are really going to work all day? they're exhausted at the end of the day, does that change things? I don't really think so. I think if you want to use the money that you're earning, that you're choosing a profession that's maybe harder, but you earn more money, you can go ahead and delegate that task to someone, talk with your partner about it for sure, but you also got to own the mental load of delegating

the task. So you got to hire them. You got to pay attention to when they're coming. Let's say it's a cleaner. You have to identify if they're hitting the standard. You have to be the one paying them and scheduling them. Just because you earn the money and you can afford to have that person doesn't necessarily mean that you should not have also the responsibility of the mental load of managing a person.

But you don't think you can say, like, I make 70% of the money that pays for our house and our kids' private school and all these things. So you should do 70% of the mental load of running the home. You could look at it that way, but I think looking at like an organization, like a company, like just because the sales department brings in more money and the marketing brings in more money, does that mean that HR has to do more or less of their job? I'd certainly play to your strengths, right? Like, I'm more of an extrovert. So I'm in charge of like getting all the numbers of our five-year-old's friends and their parents and like scheduling

playdates and stuff. And like, that's probably going to be on me because I'm an extrovert. And that comes easy to me and I like that. Brings me energy seeing. more people. It does not for Alyssa. Okay, I got a little speed round to end us. What's the hottest take that you have about carrying the mental load? She's not controlling. It is a symptom of owning the mental load that she feels controlling. What's one piece of research that you've read that really changed your mind about the mental load? I think it was when I found out that task switching costs people about 15 minutes to like fully switch

cognitive tasks and companies spend probably billions of dollars in total to not let that happen. What's a piece of common relationship advice that you think is actively bad? Happy wife, happy life. It creates asking her for her options and decision fatiguing her despite her getting her preferences and it eventually evolves into her owning more of the preferences and mental load. What's one piece of uncomfortable advice that most men need to hear? Your money is not contributing as much to your house as you think it is. Wait, say more about that. Just because you're bringing in money, you'd have to do that, whether you had a family

or not, whether you had a wife or not. And while you're bringing in money, even if you're bringing in a ton of money, that doesn't really change that much of the mental load. Sure, you might be going more expensive vacations. That doesn't change the amount of itinerary making that has to happen. The money you make is not get out of jail-free card. No. What's the smallest mental load change that has the biggest payoff?

if you can be giving options and default options, like, hey, instead of what do you want for dinner, it's, hey, I'm going to cook dinner tonight. There's beef that needs to get used in the fridge. There's leftovers and or we could do those frozen things that we wanted, but I'm leaning towards the meat's going to go bad. I'm going to do that if you have no input. Sound good? You can just say yes or opt out of thinking. And then this can be in the realm of mental load, invisible labor, or really any part of your life. But what's one habit that's changed your life? just that simple habit of I never come to her saying, hey, where are my keys? I say, hey, I checked my pocket. I checked the dish by the thing. I checked your purse. I checked the drawer where it's something.

I check the console, the car. I don't see it any idea where it is. Oftentimes I find it. And then if I don't find it, then I ask the question. It's like showing my work. Again, Matt, Matt teacher and me, like I love when they'd show their work. We'd like to leave people with something that they can do immediately after listening to this podcast and see results. So I would love to have two action steps here. What's one thing that a woman listening could do if they feel like they're taking on too much with the mental load that they could do that they would immediately see results? And what's one thing that a man listening could do?

So for the woman, I would say really try to get familiar with the emotions driving your need to hold the mental load. Sometimes as simply what this house needs, sometimes, like, especially if you can look in your body and like you can feel like, ooh, I feel a tenseness somewhere. If you can be acknowledging the emotions that are causing it, there's. so much better chance you can put things down saying like, oh, I'm actually trying to impress my sister-in-law because that one time that she commented about dust on her pants when she sat down at the dinner table. Wow, that's literally why I'm freaking out about the dust when people,

anyone comes over. Doing the emotional work of like identifying what's running the show is a huge game changer that I know has really helped Alyssa and like letting go of a fair amount of things that have really stressed her out over the years. For men, just using that invisible labor vocabulary, whenever you're seeing labor exist in your home, especially if it's not regular domestic labor, is labeling it cognitive labor and emotional labor. The more you can be labeling those things

and getting that distinction in your head as those are separate and very real labors, that it takes energy to do those things. I remember one time someone told me a really piece of uncomfortable information, and I sat semi-stone-faced for a good hour while sitting with that terrible feeling in my stomach. I don't know if I've ever felt more exhausted in my life.

Meanwhile, it looks like it did nothing. That's emotional labor. So being willing to consider that that is a specific kind of labor, it is invisible and it's hard to see if you don't talk about it. That is a huge game changer when you can be identifying those things. That and to do's. Zach, this is such a helpful conversation. tell people, I know they can find you online and watch your amazing videos, but also, like,

it's not that often that I have people on the podcast that people can just directly work with, which I think is like a cool advantage of you as well. So tell people where they can find more of you. So Zach Mental Loadcoach.com, you can find me. If you want to see the New York Times article, I think it was, does your relationship need a mental load coach? The answer was yes. And it's Zach with a CH for anybody who's grown tied to our Zach around here with a K. I'd say my Instagram is my main account. Again, Zach Mental O'C Coach. Amazing. Well, thank you so much. That is all for this episode. Thank you so much for listening on Apple or watching on Spotify or YouTube.

You can subscribe or follow so our next episodes get sent directly to your feed. If you like this episode, leave a comment or better yet, send it to a friend, a coworker, a parent, or somebody else that you think might love it. All right, I love you. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you on the next episode of the Liz Moody podcast. Oh, just one more thing. It's the legal language. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, a psychotherapist, or any other qualified professional. Obviously, I cannot go to the spot every single week, but what I can do is recreate that feeling at home. And honestly, OSIA is the biggest reason that I'm able to do that. My two favorite OSCEA products are the Undaria Algae Body Oil and

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