From doing laundry to washing the dishes: unpaid work is bad for our mental health | Sophie Brickman

Women do the majority of unpaid labor - and it creates a taxing mental load

I've been agonizing over how to respond to an email for the last 48 hours.

It doesn't involve a medical issue, a work deadline, some horrifying piece of news, a kids-back-to-school task that requires unearthing the dreaded label-maker or logging into some byzantine online portal - all of which are represented in full force in my inbox. Just a completely anodyne suggestion, from a colleague of a college friend who's eager to talk about a project she's working on, and whom I'm eager to meet.

Sophie Brickman is a contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Times and other publications, and the author of Baby, Unplugged: One Mother's Search for Balance, Reason, and Sanity in the Digital Age