Concrete advice from a psychiatrist to ease your mental burden

Make a list

List everything you have done in the last two months (buying bread for the day, preparing a bag for kindergarten, making an appointment with the teacher, signing the contact book, etc.). The purpose: identify invisible tasks to better allocate them. “We need to end the good student syndrome,” says psychiatrist Aurelia Schneider (1). If it is not essential, we eliminate it.”

Use a shared calendar

This is the basics of “mental discharge”. Many applications (Google Calendar, FamilyWall, My Familiz, Maydée, etc.) allow you to manage your daily life together. We note everything (kindergarten support, days when we are a “referent parent” at school, etc.) and alternate.

Plan together

Both in front of the screen, take time to plan when you have to think about short school holidays (two months in advance), opera or theater re-recordings, summer holidays… Most urgent. From the beginning of November, creating a list of gifts and Christmas holidays.

Get rid of meals

Here again. we expect and alternate responsibility for the evening menu (every week). Also alternately. cook and freeze dishes and vegetables (chili, ratatouille, etc.). Once all this is well established, we can smooth out the small risks and surprises.

Distribute responsibilities

Very early, all psychologists say, children can reach out. We write the daily tasks on the blackboard and assign everyone to clean the table, tidy the room, water the plants, etc. And everyone ticks when they’re done.

The first to popularize this concept was the comic book author Emma Kleet with her famous You Should Have Asked. Mental burden. These are the 1,001 little thoughts about domestic organization that clutter our spare brains, from dental appointments to shopping to vacation prep. And in eight out of ten cases it is carried by women… “Un autre regard” (4 volumes), Éd Massot, 110 p., €16, emmaclit.com.

Distribute and do not delegate.

Aurelia Schneider claims: “We should ‘share’ not ‘delegate’.” “Everyone should be the ‘mission leader’ of what they have achieved.” As long as you stay connected to the task, you feel responsible for the outcome. And if you turn yourself into a “complete works engineer,” that puts you back into a “servant boss” position.

Congratulations

Does the laundry not hang “correctly” (ie, how do you do it), is there your brand of cold-pressed olive oil, or your little one’s favorite cereal? Don’t complain. “One of the obstacles to taking initiative among men is the fear of doing something wrong. This causes a form of paralysis.” Instead, it’s up to us to use positive reinforcement to do better next time.

(1) Author: Mental workload of women and menÉditions Larousse, 224 p., €17.95.