Emotional labour is the latest bit of wellness lingo — but what is it, and how can it be managed?

You’re piercingly wide awake at 4am, mental checklist spinning.

Besides work stress, there are 304 social things on there. It’s your colleague’s birthday, your partner’s parents’ anniversary and, oh God, you’re out of toilet paper. You haven’t called your mum back or replied to your best friend’s WhatsApp message. Got kids? Chuck into the roiling hamster wheel a whole other never-ending list of school holidays, cake sales and allergies. At work, you spend the day smiling, taking interest in your boss’s life, offering to get tea and writing birthday messages to people you’ve met once, still thinking about the unpaid tasks undone when you’ve finished your paid job and feeling guilty at the emails and DMs left unanswered. You are exhausted.

Perhaps this sounds like a Fay Weldon short story or a Sarah Jessica Parker romcom — or perhaps it just sounds like your life. Actually, it has an official term: emotional labour. This is the unpaid, unappreciated effort that goes into conforming to societal expectations. Basically, it’s the exhausting act of being nice, and it overwhelmingly affects women. American sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild coined the term ‘emotional labour’ back in 1983 in her book The Managed Heart to refer to service workers and the unpaid labour involved in smilingly looking after others. But thanks to technology, and as new studies show, today emotional labour weighs heavier than ever.

While workplace gender inequality is increasingly confronted — transparency over pay, exposure of sexual harassment — emotional labour is still "highly gendered and considered to be an intrinsic and natural feminine quality that is considered to be women’s work", says Dr Catherine Theodosius, senior lecturer at the School of Health Sciences at Brighton University and author of Emotional Labour in Health Care: The Unmanaged Heart of Nursing. "Consequently women are often judged more harshly if they are not perceived to be controlling their emotions appropriately." Think of the recent US Open, where Serena Williams was penalised for her emotional outburst at the umpire, the sort of outburst Williams claimed male players often get away with. Male players have also been penalised for it, but have never had a game taken away. "You know how many other men do much worse than that?" the tennis star protested. "There’s a lot of men out here that have said a lot of things and because they’re a man, that doesn’t happen to them. This is not fair."

Neither is the daily emotional labour all women are expected to perform. This can be childcare and chores; it is also the expectation that women be, well, nice. See ‘resting bitch face’, aka a woman’s normal, relaxed face. Smiling uses 12 facial muscles. It takes work.

There was uproar when the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy published gender guidance stating that "being a woman in a British cultural context often means adhering to social norms of femininity, such as being nurturing, caring, social, emotional, vulnerable, and concerned with appearance" — unless, bizarrely, they are ‘autistic’ or ‘Northern working class’. While it was the exceptions that sparked outrage, it is the social norms of 'nurturing, caring, social, emotional, vulnerable and concerned with appearance' that become troublesome in 2018. The expectation that women should automatically cover the soft areas of life kicks us back to Fifties housewifery. Keeping up a nurturing, caring, social, emotional and vulnerable appearance causes mental overload.

Dr Heejung Chung, reader in sociology and social policy at Kent University, takes interest in this ‘mental load’ that comes with providing emotional support: "It’s not just the hours spent doing housework, etcetera, but the mental checklist that we run through trying to keep up with everything."

Technology increases the load. Social media makes ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ ever more stressful: we see perfect lives online and push for the same. It also exposes us to criticism should we appear not to prioritise others’ happiness. See the tweets after Holly Willoughby’s announcement as the new I’m a Celebrity… host, asking, "What will happen to Willoughby’s kids while she’s in the jungle?" Then there’s the fact that "things that weren’t possible before are possible now thanks to technology. You can just fit in more, and more, and more," as Chung says. "Yet our time hasn’t perpetually expanded." Add in what she calls the ‘intensification of the parent’ — the modern obsession with constantly stimulating kids — and no wonder we’re burning out.

Step forward Christine Armstrong, contributing editor of Management Today and author of new book The Mother of All Jobs, a collection of anonymous interviews with high-powered women who seem to be holding it together brilliantly, but are crumbling under the glossy surface. Here, Armstrong documents the facts facing working mothers in a depressing deluge. Over the past 20 years, the average UK working day has increased to nine hours, the longest in Europe; smart phones have added another two hours; London commutes take 80 minutes a day. Not to mention the extra million mothers joining the workforce at the precise moment that the working day has become the working day, evening, night and weekend.

Armstrong refers to Dr Bill Mitchell, a City-based psychologist who treats workplace stress disorder. He said that he tried to avoid gender generalisations but has increasingly found them unavoidable. "Women are hard-wired to belong, to take responsibility for others and men are more able to be self-protective." Which means, he says, that when an unexpected problem arrives, men are more inclined to dodge it while many women will reach out and take it. In very practical terms, if the kettle blows up at work and everyone is bitching about not getting their morning coffee, one of the women is more likely to dash out to replace it to keep the peace. It’s worse now for those with ‘always on’ jobs because, in the times when they might have got to relax and switch off their emotional labour, they may well now still be dealing with an unhappy client or boss.

This ‘hard-wiring’ combined with societal expectation is dangerous. As Theodosius explains: "There is a great deal of pressure on women to perform emotional labour and they frequently do so using surface acting techniques that, when sustained over a long period of time, can lead to burnout." She recently led a Burdett Trust study examining the relationship between surface acting, burnout and retention, showing that more than 52 per cent of nurses working in a highly regarded acute care NHS trust reported burnout, "a serious problem in a profession dominated by women and grappling with falling numbers".

So should we be selfish for our own sanity? "I’m not saying no one should smile or be nice," says Chung. "But do we need to pressure women into doing that more than men?" Discussion is key. Chung points to studies that show some couples in same-sex relationships report having the same division of labour as those in ‘stereotypical’ heterosexual relationships, ie, one does the work considered female, the other the work considered male. Yet they tend to be happier with this division because the gendered assumption of who takes which role is not set — it comes about via negotiation.

Armstrong agrees. "Be analytical about what assumptions you work to. Does it always have to be you who deals with the children when they melt down? Could your partner or someone else in your family help?" She also insists on boundaries. "Say no or ignore things. Don’t volunteer to take meeting notes or run the PTA or host a play date unless you want to and have capacity." Of course, ultimately "none of these is easy to implement: the real challenge isn’t deciding to restore some control but to find the determination to keep doing them. Especially when the pressure is on."