What’s on Her Mind: The Cognitive Workload — Book review and Reflection
In What’s on Her Mind: The Cognitive Workload, author and psychologist Alison Daminger explores a phenomenon most women know all too well: the mental effort of managing life’s many demands. While the title refers to a specific cognitive concept, the book’s real power lies in how it captures something deeply human — the invisible strain of thinking, organising, anticipating, and remembering everything that life asks of us.
For many women, life doesn’t just feel busy — it feels like a constant mental marathon. From emotional labour to household tasks, from juggling careers to caring roles, the cognitive workload is that mental tally of things to manage, monitor, and remember. And when that tally gets too heavy, stress, exhaustion, and a pervasive sense of “not doing enough” can take hold.
Why This Matters — Especially for Women
The idea of “doing it all” is more than a cultural cliché. It reflects real patterns in how responsibilities are distributed and experienced. Women still tend to:
- shoulder the bulk of household management
- provide emotional labour in families, workplaces, and relationships
- remember and coordinate others’ needs as well as their own
- juggle paid work with caregiving roles
The cognitive workload isn’t just busy-ness — it’s mental multitasking, with no clear finish line.
Daminger shows how this leads to:
- mental fatigue and irritability
- disrupted sleep
- difficulty concentrating
- feeling overwhelmed despite “looking fine” on the outside
- a persistent sense of falling short
This resonates with what many women describe in counselling: not just stress, but stress with a guilt overlay — a feeling that if they could just pull it together, things would be different.
What is the cognitive workload?
Daminger describes the cognitive workload as the ongoing mental tracking of responsibilities, plans, and potential problems. It’s not just what needs doing — it’s the mental space those thoughts take up. Even when you’re “resting,” the brain is still juggling that invisible to-do list.
This isn’t just abstract psychology. The book explains how constantly attending to future needs — children’s schedules, work deadlines, social commitments, emotional wellbeing, bills, appointments — creates a background load that never fully switches off.
For many women, this load is heavy because the work itself is often unrecognised and unrelenting.