Last Thursday at 9pm, your teenager said she wanted to talk. You said five minutes. She didn't come back. That wasn't a choice; your cognitive account was already overdrawn before she walked in. This episode introduces the Mental Load Audit: three categories for systematically handing family operations to AI, so you arrive at the moments that matter with something left to give. Let's talk about capacity.

This episode draws in part on research in:

• Cognitive load theory and working memory limits (Sweller, 1988)
• Cognitive dimension of household labor (Daminger, 2019)
• Mental load and invisible labor in family systems (Offer & Schneider, 2011)
• Attentional capacity and divided attention (Kahneman, 1973)
• Parental cognitive depletion and responsive caregiving (Dix, 1991)