How can we truly tackle the mental load of being a business owner?

Dealing with a never-ending to-do list? Psychotherapist Dr Aditi Bhalla reveals how to tackle that ever growing mental load. Dr Bhalla is a mental wellbeing mentor and psychotherapist for high-achieving professionals and entrepreneurs. With six years of experience and extensive training in mental health, mindfulness, and movement, she helps professionals prevent burnout through practical, compassionate tools. 

The term mental load is one you might have heard of. We use it to describe the invisible cognitive labour of managing life- not simply doing tasks, but the constant planning, anticipating, worrying, and holding responsibility for them in your brain. It’s the tabs that either never close or constantly keep popping up, even when the task is ‘done’. Whether it's remembering what to pack in your child's lunchbox, what appointment needs booking, or the constant tracking of what is happening next week. Even when we're not busy, our brain is still busy processing it.

Entrepreneurship can sometimes be an incredibly lonely journey, which makes that mental load even harder.

 You're often the one carrying the vision, the risk, and the responsibility, and even when you've got a team or a strong network around you, that weight is rarely something you can fully hand off to someone else. That isolation is part of what makes mental health harder to manage for business owners. If you've struggled with your mental health before, it becomes essential to have a strategy in place early, not once things have already become overwhelming.

That nervous system runs on three systems: a threat system that scans for danger, a drive system that pushes you to achieve and grow, and a soothe system that allows rest and recovery. The nature of building a company means you can end up living almost entirely in threat and drive, chasing the next milestone while bracing for the next setback, with very little space left for the soothe system to come online.

 Just as you'd never run a business without a strategy, your wellbeing needs one too, and regardless of whether you've faced mental health challenges before, that strategy shouldn't be treated as separate from your business plan. You are the root of your business, so a plan for your own wellbeing is, in effect, a plan for your business's ability to keep moving forward.

This is where most entrepreneurs think it’s just 'normal fatigue' and dismiss it because it’s easy to say I am a bit tired, getting older or simply a bit run down. But the body is always keeping score and sends us signals that it's struggling to keep up.

These could look like sleep that isn’t restorative, so you're waking up feeling exhausted or having difficulty falling asleep. Perhaps you're up at 3 am with the mind racing from the open tabs on your to-do list. The nervous system does not know how to fully power down.

It can also create tension that lives in the body. Clenched jaws, tight shoulders, headaches, or other aches and pains in the body are all common. The body braces under constant chronic stress, leading to fatigued and painful muscles. Skin flare-ups such as eczema, psoriasis, acne, and cold sores are just a few common conditions that all respond to high cortisol (the stress hormone), which elevates when we are in threat-based drive. Brain fog too – many find themselves walking into rooms and losing their train of thought, forgetting mid-sentence, an inability to concentrate. None of these are ideal when you've got a business to run.

It is critical to understand that these are not separate problems to fix individually but, when looked at holistically, can often be a unified signal: the mental load is too much.

So how do you actually manage this through the rigours of growing a company? This is where self-compassion becomes a genuine strategy. The strategy is not with one big overhaul, but small, consistent practices woven through your working day, because consistency matters far more than intensity here. A few minutes practised regularly will do more than an elaborate routine attempted occasionally and abandoned when things get busy. This might look like:

• Taking one conscious breath before you open your laptop in the morning to centre.
• Taking a 30-second compassionate pause when the pressure spikes, closing your eyes and asking 'what do I need most right now?'
• A brief pause before eating instead of consuming a meal while answering emails.
• A moment of stillness mid-afternoon, stepping away from the screen before the stress compounds, or a small evening ritual that signals to your body the demands of the day are easing.
• Make the invisible visible. Externalising it, writing it down, sharing it, and having open, honest conversations about who is carrying what, be it at home or work is not just practically useful but can be a form of relief.

None of these need to be done perfectly or at the same time every day. The value isn't in how elaborate the practice is; it's in the act of returning to it, again and again, especially on the days when building a business and the mental load that comes with it makes it hardest to do.