Mum Brain or Mental Over-Load?
- Jodi Pawluski
- Jul 17
- 5 min read
For decades, the concept of ‘Mum Brain’ has been synonymous with the experience of motherhood. It’s almost a rite of passage to experience the memory loss and brain fog of pregnancy and the postpartum period (also called Pregnancy Brain, Baby Brain, Mummy Brain, Mumnesia). But what if Mum Brain had more to do with the mental load of motherhood, namely the cognitive and emotional labour that primarily falls on mothers, and less to do with mum brains?
I’m a neuroscientist who studies the neuroscience of motherhood and maternal mental health (check out the Maternal Mental Health series I previously co-edited for Inspire the Mind). I also authored a book on the topic, Mommy Brain, and produce the podcast Mommy Brain Revisited. I’m also a mother and have had my own personal experience of ‘Mum Brain’. You could say I spend a lot of my time thinking about motherhood and the brain.
Over the past few years, I’ve written about how we need to rebrand the term Mum Brain (including in my previous article for Inspire the Mind) to capture the amazing things that the brain of a mother does when she becomes a parent. Still, I don’t think this rebrand is going to happen.
Mum Brain, the term, is too entrenched in our vocabulary. We use it to laugh off the impossibilities of motherhood, to share an experience that often feels overwhelming, to normalise mental struggles, all while diminishing the capacities of a mum’s brain and disregarding the multitude of tasks it is doing.
Let me explain. If Mum Brain was a thing – as in every mum had a biological predisposition to forget or be ‘dysfunctional’– we would probably see news headlines attesting to this, “Pregnant Physician Prescribes Wrong Medication Again” or, better yet, we likely wouldn’t have little humans surviving and thriving. Caregiving takes a lot of brain power. We just don’t value it as much as other forms of thinking and doing. Thus, we are quick to blame the brains of mothers when they understandably struggle to keep up with the overwhelming mental load of modern motherhood, rather than questioning what we can do to reduce it.
But enough about my musings, what does the research tell us about ‘Mum Brain’?
There’s a growing body of research indicating that mums face a significant mental load as they do more of the planning and execution of household tasks and childcare in heterosexual relationships, from cleaning to organising medical appointments and playdates, with the exception of taking out the trash. I’m not going to get into the details of mental load and gender stereotypes here, but what I want to point out is that this mental load of motherhood is likely adding to the sleep deprivation and physiological changes a new mum experiences, resulting in a mum’s brain ‘short-circuiting’.
When mums are asked in research settings about how good they feel their memory is, they usually rate it as being worse than if they didn’t have children. Research also shows that how a mum feels about her memory is related to her sleep and mental health, how isolated she is, and the role of constant interruption in her life, as usually she is the primary caregiver and the go-to adult for the child(ren).
Interestingly, when mums' memories are tested to better understand ‘Mum Brain’, the science shows that memory ‘problems’ in pregnancy and the postpartum period are, at best, very slight.
Usually, when tested in a laboratory, pregnant and postpartum women do quite well on memory tests and don’t differ from their non-mum counterparts, except with slight deficits in some executive functions (skills that you use to manage everyday tasks like making plans, solving problems and adapting to new situations) such as remembering words for things and some forms of short-term memory. Other research even shows memory improvements in pregnancy, particularly for things that are related to parenting.
Why then is there a disconnect between how a mum feels about her memory and what science says about it? This seems to be due to the mental load of motherhood.
When research investigates memory and motherhood, typically mums are invited to come into a laboratory, which is a nice quiet setting, often with childcare, and are asked to complete some memory tests. One study, which I co-authored, investigated the memory performance of pregnant women at home versus in the lab. Interestingly, we found that pregnant women do well on memory tests in the lab but do poorly at home, suggesting that the home environment plays a role and may be impacting their memory.
A recent study also showed that a mum’s performance on memory tests is impacted by the amount of stressors she experiences, including sleep deprivation, life stressors and maternal age (could this be perimenopause?). It seems that the more mental load a mum is facing, the more her memory is impacted.
The mental overload of motherhood may be the missing link in understanding the ‘mum brain’ that so many mothers talk about. This also suggests that while ‘Mum Brain’ is a thing, it’s not a biologically pre-determined fact. It’s likely more a result of environmental factors, social expectations and gender norms.
The brain is not a never-ending reserve of power. Any brain will ‘dysfunction’ when it is overwhelmed and has too many to-dos. It can hit its limit, especially when it hasn’t been recharged. The good news is that once a mum has a reduced mental overload, she likely will feel that her brain is functioning in a better way.
The BIG question then, is how do we reduce the mental load of motherhood? There is no one way to do this, and it’s not solely a mum’s responsibility. Sometimes, reducing the mental load of motherhood means working together as a couple to come up with a plan of who does what when it comes to childcare and household tasks. Other times, it may be that the mother needs to figure out what is important for her as a mother and let go of others’ expectations (easier said than done). Or it may mean bringing in extra help or finding creative options with friends and family to share the caring. In fact, for many mums, it may mean getting some uninterrupted sleep or time to herself. As you can imagine, the list of options for easing the mental load of motherhood is endless, which means there are countless ways to intervene.
The bottom line is that taking care of children is not a one-person job, and it definitely is not 100% a mother’s responsibility, 24 hours a day, on top of everything else she does. We all have the necessary brain parts to care-give (and clean the house), so let’s remember that and start to ease the mental load of motherhood for those around us.