When the "Midlife Collision" Meets the Mental Load Collaborative

Last week I walked into Bloomberg Center in Washington, DC for the first meeting of The Mental Load Collaborative, organized by David Smith and Colleen Stuart from the Gender & Work Initiative at Johns Hopkins. I had been excited about this event for months and I was not sure what to expect.

I knew the lineup was made up of some of the researchers I admire most: Allison Daminger, whose research on cognitive labor has shaped how we understand invisible work and Leah Ruppanner from the University of Melbourne, whose data connects mental load to workforce outcomes globally. I had frequently quoted both of their work prior to meeting them and couldn't wait to dig in.

But here is what I did not expect. How incredible the rest of the room would be.

Sitting alongside the academics were content creators with massive social media audiences who have been making mental load visible to millions of families every single day. There were coaches, applied practitioners and consultants like myself, AI builders exploring how technology might help redistribute cognitive labor, and every one of us was in it to solve it.

The room was deliberately, beautifully diverse in perspective, not just in identity, but in how each person encounters and teaches about mental load in different ways.

I have been to a lot of conferences and webinars. This was a collaborative. And the difference matters.

THE APPRECIATIVE INQUIRY DIFFERENCE

The Mental Load Collaborative used an Appreciative Inquiry summit model, which means we did not spend the day cataloging problems (thank goodness). We listed challenges, and imagined dream states as a unified team. Then we talked as a full room about how to achieve a better state for all people. Finally we broke into smaller working groups, self-selecting into the solutions that we felt emotionally drawn to. Here's what really stood out to me the most:

It had been a long time since I had been in a room where open discourse and disagreement not only happened, but were encouraged.

There is no way to put three generations side by side to solve a problem and not expect there to be some cognitive dissonance. Case in point, I went in blissfully unaware that I had an implicit bias towards content creation as a teaching tool, and quickly came to realize I needed to face that bias head on to avoid change resistance.

Growth like that doesn't happen in echo chambers, but neither does sustainable change.

If you are wondering what workstream I chose in the end, I am sure it is no surprise that I wanted to lead workplace redesign. I cannot share the specifics of what we built in that room, because the work is still developing and it belongs to the group and not to me. But I can tell you that the energy of building something, rather than just naming something, changes the quality of the conversation entirely.

When you move from "here is what is broken" to "here is what we are going to do about it," people show up differently. The ideas get braver. The commitments get real.

MY PRIMARY CONTRIBUTION: THE MIDLIFE COLLISION

I was one of the only participants approaching mental load from the midlife perspective, and I brought a concept I have been teaching for several years in my Burnout to Breakthrough sessions: 'The Midlife Collision™'

Here's how I like to explain the 'Midlife Collision.' Think of two container ships traveling toward each other at full speed, both stacked to the hilt. One is the work ship: peak career responsibilities, leadership demands, financial pressures, strategic complexity. The other is the home ship: aging parents, teenagers or young adults who still need you, partnership maintenance, health management, household operations.

In midlife, both home and work are often at maximum capacity. And underneath them (at least for women), hormonal fluctuations are churning the water, bouncing the containers, making everything harder to hold in place.

The tossing and turning is confusing, and most midlife women can't compartmentalize the ensuing chaos and figure out that which is caused by hormones, other factors, or a mix of both. Where peak career demands, caregiving responsibilities, and hormonal changes crash together, that is 'The Midlife Collision.' And for millions of people navigating this intersection, the mental load is not just heavy. It is compounding.

THE INVISIBLE LAYER: MENOPAUSE MASKING

There is another dimension to midlife mental load that rarely enters the conversation.When you are experiencing menopause at work, you are carrying an additional cognitive burden that has no name in most organizations: the work of hiding it. It takes effort to mask brain fog in a meeting so your leaders don't think you've lost competence. It takes energy to disguise irritability with a difficult coworker or to cover a hot flash without anyone noticing.

‘Menopause masking’ is the constant calculation of whether to disclose symptoms or stay silent, and mental load is the cost of having to navigate either option.

This complex decision-making framework is often happening on autopilot, running in the back of our minds. And it sits on top of a mental load that has likely already passed capacity. Fears of stigma and negative career repercussions mean that most midlife women are suffering in silence.

OUT OF THE ECHO CHAMBER

The mental load conversation, like the menopause at work conversation, needs to break out of the echo chamber. Before the collaborative many of us, the people who understand mental load most deeply, and teach on the subject were doing so in isolation. The researchers published largely for academic audiences, the content creators were speaking to audiences that relate directly to the shared lived experiences, and as applied workplace consultants we were primarily sharing this information with organizations bought in.

The Mental Load Collaborative is trying to change that and brought all of these big beautiful voices into one room, not to agree, but to build. As Adam Grant recently stated:

"Only following people who agree with you is a recipe for confirmation bias and groupthink. Critical thinking depends on listening to people who question your assumptions and challenge your conclusions. Learning is the product of engaging with a range of thoughtful views."

And I am so grateful that I was able to be part of these conversations and to represent the midlife perspective.

Opening up the conversation about menopause at work is something I am working on with The Fuchsia Tent LLC and Society for Women's Health Research (SWHR). Our national study, "Menopause at Work: From Echo Chamber to Mainstream Practice," is surveying people experiencing menopause alongside the decision-makers who control benefits, budgets, and culture. The goal is to move these conversations from niche advocacy to standard business practice.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR EMPLOYERS

If you lead an organization and you have been watching the mental load conversation from the sidelines, here is what I want you to understand.

Mental load is likely affecting much of your workforce, and it is not a personal problem. Mental load is a business problem.

The research already shows that disproportionate cognitive labor at home drives emotional exhaustion, increases turnover intentions, and decreases career resilience. Gallup found that female manager engagement dropped seven points in a single year. Researchers are calling invisible domestic labor "the third shift." And in midlife, all of this intensifies. The people carrying the heaviest mental load are often your most experienced, most capable, most senior contributors. They are not burning out because they cannot handle the work. They are burning out because nobody sees the full picture of what they are carrying.

The Mental Load Collaborative is working on solutions. I am honored to be part of it. And I will share more as the work develops. In the meantime, if you want to understand how mental load, menopause, and midlife converge in your workforce, that is the work I do every day. Let's talk.

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Thank you to friends, to the Mental Load Collaborative organizers, David Smith, Colleen Stuart, Leah Ruppanner, Molly Dickens, PhD, Kate Mangino, Katie Kitchens, and Haley Swenson, thank you for building the room where this work can happen.

Many of the researchers listed above already have a book or books published that you can read on the subject of mental load and Leah Ruppanner's new book Drained and David Smith and Brad Johnson's Book Fair Share are available for pre-order!