84. The Mental Unload: Why Your Brain Deserves a Break Too

Are you mentally exhausted even after a full night’s sleep? Do you feel like you're constantly juggling an invisible to-do list no one else can see? You might be carrying the mental load—and it's time for a serious mental unload.

In this episode, Dr. Stacy Heimburger breaks down the difference between traditional self-care and a true mental unload, and why so many women feel overwhelmed, even during “me time.” If your brain never seems to shut off, this conversation will feel like the permission slip you didn’t know you needed.

💡 In this episode, you’ll learn:

• What the mental load really is (and why women tend to carry it most)
• The difference between real rest and “performative” self-care
• Simple ways to mentally unload without needing a whole weekend away
• Why your brain needs quiet input-free time to truly reset
• Dr. Stacy’s personal story of her most restorative weekend ever—and what made it so powerful
• How mental clutter leads to emotional eating and what to do instead

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Free 2-Pound Plan Call!
Want to jump start your weight loss? Schedule a free call where Dr. Stacy Heimburger will work with you to create a personalized plan to lose 2 pounds in one week, factoring in your unique circumstances, challenges, and aspirations. Schedule now! www.sugarfreemd.com/2pound

This episode was produced by The Podcast Teacher: www.ThePodcastTeacher.com.

Transcript

Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast. This is episode 84, The Mental Unload. Right, we talk a lot about the mental load, and I wanna talk about the mental unload.

Actually, what I first wanna say is, if you hear a dog barking in the background of this, I apologize sincerely. My recording day is my dog is home with me, and he takes his protection detail very seriously. And he’s a little anxious at baseline. He actually has a Xanax prescription, my poor little puppy, so sometimes just gets a little overexcited. Julia is my wonderful podcast producer, and she can usually get rid of most of the background noise, but I just hear him losing his mind out there. So if you hear him in the background, just know, I am safe and protected if that matters to you—and that he will eventually calm down. So he needs a mental unload more than all of us, I think.

So let’s talk about mental unload.

I have heard a lot about the mental load, and I experience a lot of it, okay? As the mom, right? There is a lot of mental load that comes with that. As a physician, there’s a lot of mental load that comes with that. As an entrepreneur, there’s a lot of mental load that comes with that. And what I mean by that is that there are just a lot of duties and expectations and like this to-do list that is kind of never-ending, right?

We’re really experiencing it right now. We have a trip, and we have to get the kids to and from school, and so like planning that calendar and who’s picking the kids up and who’s getting them home and who’s getting them to sports, right? That is all a mental load of task and energy that needs to be done on top of everything that we already do.

And my husband does take a lot of tasks off the plate, but I still usually have the mental load and then have to sort of assign those tasks, right? And I’m sure there’s lots of you in this boat as well. So it is a lot of mental noise that’s a little persistent, okay? And it’s really hard sometimes to lay that mantle down.

And so we talk about self-care a lot and this idea of needing a break. And I 100% think we need self-care, but not only do we need self-care in the like, “I could use a minute to take care of myself,” like I need to probably get a pedicure or, you know, something else nice for myself or these breaks of time where I need to take care of me—like my functioning and my appearance and everything else. Those are all self-care.

A mental unload to me means something a little bit different, and that is the time that I can truly not worry about anything, right? I can 100% pass off the to-do list to somebody else, I can let it go, and I can be really quiet in my brain—and maybe quiet outwardly as well. But it’s a little bit more intense to me than a self-care moment, okay?

And I’ve been thinking about this a lot. It was actually almost a year ago that I kind of tagged onto somebody’s birthday weekend at Miraval, which if you haven’t been, is an amazing resort. They actually have three locations. And you have all these activities and you can mix and match, and there are so many activities to plan from, and it’s so fun because you can do as much as you want or as little as you want. But they really don’t want you to have your cell phones.

And I remember going to this weekend away—thinking it was October, November, something—and I was like, “I’m gonna plan SugarFreeMD for next year. I’m gonna use it as my strategic planning weekend because I’m gonna be alone, I’m gonna go to Headspace, and I’ll be able to plan when I get there.” And so I brought my computer. I did not take it out once.

I got sucked into this mental unload weekend, and it was the most relaxed, restful, restorative weekend—maybe ever since I’ve had kids, honestly. And the reason I keep thinking about this weekend and why, like why did it feel so good, right? And it was because it was this—it was a true mental unloading of tasks. My husband had the kids, he was taking care of everything they needed. My mother was in a little bit better health at that time. She didn’t need anything. Like, nobody needed me, okay?

And so it’s this: nobody needed me. I didn’t need to do anything for anyone. I didn’t need to be anywhere. I didn’t have any calls I needed to return. I didn’t have any emails that needed to be answered right then. I didn’t have any patients to take care of. I could truly set down the entire mental load and just forget about it for a minute.

And I think that these moments are really, really important, because sometimes our self-care can get a little ruined by our mental load, right? I was just thinking, because I tried to take a bath the other day—which is normally a nice, calm experience, right? And that can be a little bit of self-care, except that like, Owen walked in and was like, “I wanna take a bath. Get out.” Like, my six-year-old kicked me out of my bathtub. Like, he was still there, and I still had to worry if he needed anything. And like, the dog was probably barking at someone—like he’s doing now, right? There was still a mental load that could not be fully set down even though I was trying to have the self-care moment.

I have gone to get a pedicure and I’ve been on my phone checking email, right? I’ve gone to get my hair done and I’m still like mentally task-listing every single thing I need to get done. So it is a rare time that we can truly sit down this entire mental load and let it go.

So how can we do that? If we’re not gonna go to Miraval for an amazing weekend, right, there’s gotta be other ways to do it. And I think I’ve found some, okay?

So, if we’re calling the mental load like all the behind-the-scenes stuff and this anticipatory nature that we have of like, what is someone gonna need next week—all those things, okay—what I need us to do to unload that:

Number one is, we’ve gotta write down all the tasks, right? That’s the first way of getting them sort of out of your brain and giving your brain a break—is to get them out onto paper. Okay? So every single thing we need to do, we can write it out on paper. We can look at the calendar, and we can look three months ahead if we want to, and work backwards, and we can just sort of get it all out.

Okay, the next thing is that we need to maybe have some quiet, okay? So it does not need to be a full weekend. It can be five minutes. We’ve written everything down, we’ve decided nothing needs to happen this very second, and we can go for a walk outside in silence—with no input. No podcast. No background music. No nothing. Just walk outside in the quiet with nothing to be done right now, okay? No one needs us for this five minutes. Like, we have no task that needs to be done this five minutes.

See if you can leave your phone at home. I know that gives some people like immediate palpitations that they will leave their phone at home, but can we leave our phone at home and just—five minutes outside?

Okay, the other way is we can journal, right? And we call it a “brain dump” in the coaching space, right? Just dump it all out. So this is if maybe it’s not just our to-do list that is weighing us down. Maybe there’s some worries that we have. Maybe there’s some just conflict going on, something more like interpersonal issues. This is where we might need to journal and get them out too, okay?

Practice saying like:
“This is not… like I don’t need to do this today. I don’t need to process this today. I don’t need to carry this today.”

Or even better:
“This is not mine to carry today.”

So powerfully, intentionally, mindfully getting it out of our head onto paper, and then disassociating from that—and going somewhere where we can have like little to no input for a minute.

And that could be a bath, okay? I’m not trying to like poo-poo the bathtub, okay? If no one’s home, and you can truly like be in your bath and relax, and that feels like a mental unload in addition to the self-care—like God bless you, that’s wonderful. I am so happy.

But this mental downtime, okay—it’s not really happening if other people are around and might call us to do something.

I will say my husband has been great about doing this. A lot of times on the weekend, he’ll take both kids to the gym with him. They have a place like free childcare there, and the kids love it. They’ve got all kinds of things to run around and play and do. And I’ll get like two hours. And I usually spend the first hour doing work, which is this—I’m like unloading my brain, okay?

If I’m lucky, I get done doing that and still have a few minutes to myself before they get home. Sometimes I just time it perfectly where I finally get all my brain empty and they come back in and, of course, need me. But at least I’ve gotten it out, okay? I just need to get faster at getting it out and probably not leave it all until Sunday to get it out.

But we have to unload our brain. We have to get rid of our to-do list. We have to get rid of the emotional to-do list, right? The things we need to work on. The anticipatory to-do list. And we do that—we just get them out there.

Now, when I’m going through my to-do list, it doesn’t mean I have to get it done right now, okay? I just want to write it down so that my brain doesn’t have to think about it right now.

This is the beauty of using a planner and planning our time. It’s not necessarily for whatever reason you think you need a planner for. It’s because it is out of our head and onto paper, and it can free up some mental space, okay?

All we’re trying to do is free. We are mentally unloading. It’s like unpacking the car or groceries. We’ve got to unpack our brain—to-do list and tasks and like, things it wants to do. And then we need to be in a structured sort of mental downtime, right?

We have to restart our equipment all the time for it to work, right? We have to restart our phone once in a while. We have to restart our computer. We need to reset ourselves too. This is like a little reset. We have to close down all the windows and turn it off for a minute—and then restart it.

This is a mental unload.

If you can do it for a weekend, I highly recommend it. But I’d like you to get into the habit of at least doing it for a little bit at least once a week. Once a week. Like, can we restart? Like, reset button, okay?

Close down all the tabs. We do that by journaling. We do that by making our to-do list—getting it out of our brain. Then we shut it off. And when we are shut off, no one can talk to us, we cannot be responsible for anyone, we cannot have anything to do.

And then we can restart. And then we’re like refreshed and we’re working better, right? Just like a phone.

We are allowed to put it down. We are allowed to rest without performing. We do not need to be the emergency contact for the entire universe. We don’t.

I mean, the baby step would be: put your phone on focus and don’t let anyone ring in for a minute. My phone is on focus right now. Feels amazing. Nothing’s gonna bother me. I’m recording my podcast. This is my time for that today.

We don’t do that enough.

Takeaways

Takeaways for today: Just like anything else, we need to reset sometimes. And we need to do that not just with self-care—although we do that too—we need a mental unload.

We need to get it all out of our brain, and then we need a minute of some like, no input—whether that be a walk, whether that be some noise-canceling headphones and a chair somewhere. Maybe that is in a tub. I don’t know. But we need like zero to low input to give our brain a break—where nobody needs us, and none of our to-do list needs to get done.

And then we reset and we are refocused and we are replenished.

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Hopefully this feels good, even if it’s just your permission slip to mentally unload. Then permission slip away—or a doctor’s excuse, a prescription, whatever you need it to be. I am giving it to you. I want you to mentally unload at least once a week, okay?

And then like, if you can get away for a weekend quarterly—do it. Amazing. I think it is so essential. And you’ll just feel so much better, just more in control, and just functioning better—just like when we reset our phones.

So please, share this with a friend that needs that. If you’re feeling extra loving toward me, please rate and review the podcast. I would really appreciate it.

Again, if you’ve heard my pup, Ponchatoula, barking in the background this whole time—he’s just a very good guard dog, so we love him for that.

Alright everybody—until next week.
Bye!