Mental load test

The mental load is the anticipating, planning and follow-up work you carry in your head so that daily life keeps running, even when the tasks themselves are shared. The term was coined by the French sociologist Monique Haicault in 1984. This questionnaire uses 24 everyday situations to place that load on four axes, in about seven minutes.

Where does the idea come from? It grew out of the sociology of domestic work. In 1984, Monique Haicault described the ordinary management of a life lived in two halves: holding paid work and home together at once, with a constant tension between times and places that never stay separate. Thirty-five years later, the sociologist Allison Daminger, writing in the American Sociological Review, broke that cognitive household labor down into four operations: anticipating a need, identifying the available options, deciding, and then monitoring that the decision actually worked. Those four operations are the thread running through the axes of this questionnaire.

What does the questionnaire measure? Four axes, six situations each. Household load covers anticipating and planning the running of the place you live: thinking of what has to be done, not only doing it. Work load covers coordination, keeping track of what appears in no job description, and availability outside working hours. Relational load covers the care given to others, emotional availability and the upkeep of the atmosphere between people. Recovery covers the time genuinely available for yourself and the ability to switch off. Every item refers to the past month, so that answers stay comparable if you take the questionnaire again later.

Mental load at work, at home, in relationships: do you have to choose? No. All four axes sit in the same questionnaire and are reported separately. The same person can carry a heavy load at work and a light one at home, or the reverse. That is the point of a per-axis result: it shows where the load concentrates, which a single overall score hides. The four percentages are reported separately, with no ranking between them, in the detailed reading.

Is the mental load a gendered subject? The available research points to an uneven split. Daminger (2019) found that cognitive household labor falls mostly to women, particularly the anticipating and the monitoring. Ciciolla and Luthar (2019) documented the same imbalance and its link with reported well-being. Aviv and colleagues (2024) reported a share of cognitive labor even more unequal than the share of physical chores, associated with higher levels of stress and exhaustion. None of that says anything about your own situation, and this questionnaire is written to be taken by anyone: not one of its 24 situations assumes a gender, a partner, children or a salaried job.

How is the score calculated? Each answer is worth 0 to 4 points, multiplied by the weight of the question, which ranges from 1 to 3. The total is rescaled to 100 and placed in one of four bands. The four axes are computed separately, as a percentage of the maximum reachable on the items of that axis. On the recovery axis the items are reversed: the more time you have for yourself, the lower the measured load. Weights and band thresholds were set by the Brain Quiz editorial team. They come from no population calibration.

This questionnaire only collects your point of view. It does not measure how tasks are actually divided in a home or in a team, it does not tell a passing overload apart from a situation that has lasted for years, and it says nothing about anyone's responsibility. There is no single reference instrument for the mental load: the cognitive household labor scales published so far are recent and were built on specific populations. The items offered here were written for Brain Quiz, and no published scale is reproduced.

What can you do with the result? It establishes nothing about your health. It gives a dated reference point, useful if you want to take the questionnaire again in a few months to watch a trend, or to open a conversation with the people concerned from concrete elements rather than a vague feeling. A load that stays high is a recognized factor in exhaustion: if your result is high and the situation lasts, raising it with your family doctor or a psychologist is a reasonable step.