You're doing a lot of emotional labour. Here's how to lighten the load

There’s a group chat active among my friends on any given day. It usually blows up right before the holidays. “My kid keeps crying, telling me her friends are being mean. Husband is cranky – not sure why? Need to pick up groceries but drained after listening to my boss vent for the past hour. Help,” writes Ilana Gold, a working mother of three. Everybody chimes in with tales of meltdowns and exhaustion .

While Hochschild’s definition was specific to the work force, the concept of emotional labour has since entered the mainstream to include the emotional work that happens at home and among friends, too. Not to be confused with “mental load” – that constant to-do list, from laundry to grocery shopping to school lunches to remembering every family member’s birthday and buying gifts accordingly – emotional labour involves putting your emotions to work.

For example, if a child returns from school looking sad and picking on his little brother, emotional labour involves noticing and responding appropriately: “I see you’re frowning and you don’t usually pick on your brother. What’s going on?” As Heitler explains, “Emotional labour is the ability to use why and how questions to tease out the details of what’s bothering him.” In other words, being empathetic.

Despite these inequalities, Hackman sees emotional labour as having great value; it involves empathy and compassion, which clearly benefit everyone. The goal, however, is to recognize the worth of this kind of work, and create ways for sharing the load. Experts agree that taking on too much emotional labour can lead to feeling overwhelmed, frustrated, depleted and resentful. Take teachers, for instance, whose job involves caring for others.

Of course, this type of response to emotional-labour overload isn’t so simple when it comes to the workplace. Scott Schieman is a professor of sociology at University of Toronto who studies trends in quality of working life and how it shapes well-being. His findings reveal that people have become angrier, in general, since COVID. “The instability and rudeness of customers pushes emotional labour to another level,” he says of public-facing roles.

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