Running on Empty: Why So Many Australians Are Carrying More Than They Can Hold

At times it is hard to notice how much you are carrying until something stops you. The afternoon you cancel a coffee because you cannot face one more conversation. The Sunday you sit on the couch and cannot remember what you wanted to do with the weekend. The morning you snap at someone you love over something small, and feel a flash of guilt followed by exhaustion.

It rarely arrives as a crisis. It builds, quietly, week after week, in the form of a calendar that never empties, a family who needs more, a job that creeps into the evenings, and the running list of everyone else’s appointments, lunches and feelings to track. This is the toll of the mental load.

For a long time, this experience did not have a name. Beneath the everyday language of “stressed” or “tired” was something more particular. Researchers have begun calling it the mental load: the cognitive and emotional labour of keeping things running in the background. The remembering. The anticipating. The noticing when someone is off and quietly adjusting around it. It is invisible because it happens internally, and heavy because it is tied to the people we care about. Beyond Blue now reports that close to one in two Australian workers say they are currently experiencing burnout, a picture that does not exclude any one industry or stage of life.

The shape of burnout

Burnout is often described as a workplace problem. In practice, it is closer to what happens when a nervous system has been asked to stay switched on for too long without enough recovery. The body keeps producing the cortisol it needs to meet the demands of the day, impacting sleep, concentration and small irritations begin to feel large. The capacity to enjoy things, including the things you love, quietly narrows.

People often describe a strange flatness alongside the exhaustion. A sense that they are not really there. Research published in The Lancet Public Health, drawing on Australian longitudinal data, has shown that the relationship between unpaid labour and mental health is real, measurable and unevenly shared.

The picture is visible at population level too. The ABS National Study of Mental Health and Wellbeing, found that more than one in six adults aged 16 to 85 met criteria for an anxiety disorder in the previous 12 months, with rates rising again among young women. What people are describing is not unusual. It is what happens when a system runs too hot for too long.

The trap is that the very strategies that helped at first, pushing through, staying organised, being the person others rely on, are the same strategies that keep us depleted. The harder you work to hold everything in place, the harder it becomes to step back from it.

Where to start

There is no single intervention that fixes the mental load. But there are starting points that consistently make a difference, both in our clinical work and in the literature.

The first is naming it. Researchers describe the mental load as enduring, boundaryless and invisible, three features that make it almost impossible to address without language. People often arrive in therapy describing themselves as snappy, distracted, or “not coping” before they have words for what is happening underneath. Identifying the load makes it possible to respond to it rather than blame yourself for it.

The second is renegotiating, not just dividing. Splitting tasks rarely solves the problem if the tracking and the worry stay with the same person. A recent University of Bath study found that mothers still carry around 71 percent of the household mental load on average, while fathers carry around 29 percent, even in homes where the visible chores look evenly split. In couples therapy we see the same pattern again and again. Tasks move, but the planning, the remembering and the worry stay with one person, and resentment quietly grows in its place. The shift that helps families is sharing the thinking, not just the doing.

The third is recovery that is actually recovery. Scrolling on the couch is not the same as rest. The autonomic nervous system needs movement, time outdoors, real conversations and proper sleep to recover from sustained activation. Another evening of half attention to a screen rarely meets the threshold.

The fourth is professional support when the load has tipped into something more. Anxiety, low mood, irritability that lingers, sleep that won’t return, or a sense of dread on Sunday evenings are all signs worth taking seriously rather than waiting out. Talking with someone can help externalise the mental load and find clarity in the adjustment, and has been shown to increase focus on yourself, build capacity for compromise, and challenge the guilt that comes with reclaiming cognitive space.

Where The Mind Clinic comes in

The Mind Clinic supports adults across the full range of pressures that fuel burnout. Our clinicians work with people navigating workplace stress, leadership and high responsibility roles, career transitions and adjustment, as well as the family dynamics, relationship strain and parenting challenges that often sit underneath.

Our clinical and registered psychologists offer individual therapy for anxiety, depression, trauma, burnout and the slow erosion of capacity that the mental load can cause. We work with couples where the load has begun to shape the relationship itself, and with families and parents trying to find their way back to each other. We also run small group programs for adolescents and parents looking for shared language and practical tools.

The work is practical and compassionate. We focus on what can actually change, not on adding one more thing to your list.