MissPerceived

In this episode of Missperceived, Leah paints a painfully familiar picture: you finally hand off a task—signing the permission slip, managing a parent’s medication, organizing a meal—and instead of feeling lighter, you feel more anxious. You worry they’ll forget, won’t follow instructions, or won’t do it the way you know would make your child or parent feel truly cared for.
Leah unpacks why delegation is so emotionally loaded, especially for women who’ve been set up as default caregivers for kids, partners, friends, coworkers, and aging parents. She connects this to a growing care crisis, where more and more women are being squeezed between supporting their own households and looking after older relatives, often at the cost of their paid work and wellbeing. Drawing on her book Drained: Reduce Your Mental Load to Do Less and Be More and her “audit” tool, she shares how to decide what to hand off, who to trust with it, and—crucially—how to stop tracking and overthinking once you’ve delegated, so other people actually get the chance to step up and grow.
Follow Leah: @prof.leahruppanner
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In this episode of MissPerceived, Leah celebrates that Drained: Reduce Your Mental Load to Do Less and Be More is finally out—and dives into a question readers keep asking her: do some people simply have more bandwidth than others, and is it possible to grow your own capacity without destroying yourself in the process?
She explains why she thinks of all the invisible planning, worrying, and coordinating you do as a finite resource, not an endless well, and shares what she’s hearing from new “invisible work” collaboratives she’s convening in London, DC, and beyond. Leah explores why some people seem naturally able to carry more, how age and life stage shape your personal bandwidth, and how you might actually expand your capacity by cutting out pointless drains and getting more efficient at the thinking work that really matters to you and your family. If you’ve ever wondered why you feel tapped out while someone else looks like they’re “handling it all,” this episode offers a new, more compassionate way to understand your limits—and what you can do with the energy you have.
Follow Leah: @prof.leahruppanner
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Leah finally pulls back the curtain on a piece of her research she hasn’t fully shared yet: the mental load at work and how it travels both directions between your job and your home. Drawing on her book Drained: How to Reduce Your Mental Load to Do Less and Be More and prior research with colleagues at the University of Melbourne, she explains why the mental load is not just “to-do lists” or cognitive labor, but invisible, boundaryless, emotional thinking work you carry everywhere you go.
Leah walks through the eight types of mental load and invites you to look at how they show up differently in your work life versus your home life, using insights from her Lighten Lab assessment tool. She highlights what her studies are finding about dads in particular: men are often thinking intensely about safety and “dream building” for the family, trying to show up as better, more emotionally present fathers than their own dads while also compartmentalizing work so it doesn’t bleed into home. The twist? When men feel justified in investing in their own dreams and rest, many women are still running everything behind the scenes—fueling resentment and burnout. This episode gives you language to see your work mental load clearly and to start rebalancing it in your own life.
Follow Leah: @prof.leahruppanner
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Right before launching her book Drained: Reduce Your Mental Load to Do Less and Be More, Leah found a lump in her breast on vacation and was diagnosed with breast cancer. In this deeply personal episode, she shares what it feels like to carry the emotional thinking work of a serious health crisis on top of everyday life: worrying about your child’s future, your career, your dreams, and everyone else’s feelings while trying to process your own.
Follow Leah: @prof.leahruppanner
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Leah says the quiet part out loud: your parents (and older generations) are probably not the people who can help you solve your biggest life problems right now. Drawing on themes from Drained: Reduce Your Mental Load to Do Less and Be More, she unpacks why the world you’re managing—pandemics, political instability, climate anxiety, precarious work, AI, and always-on social media—is fundamentally different from the one they came of age in.
She explores what happens when you go looking “up” or “down” generations for support and end up with blame, outdated advice, or total misunderstanding instead of comfort. Leah talks about the mental load of carrying your own crises and doing relationship repair across generations, and offers a compassionate reframe: stop asking people to understand a world they don’t live in, and start finding the people who can actually see you, support you, and tell you what you most need to hear—you’re doing a great job.
Follow Leah: @prof.leahruppanner
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.