By Katrina Zalcmane, co-founder of Véa

101,000 journalled words. That’s what it took to make women’s mental load measurable – and what it revealed was not what we expected.

We can track a woman’s cycle to the hour, map her hormones, her fertility window, her sleep habits.

But we have had remarkably little structured visibility into the cognitive and emotional load running underneath all of it – the layer that shapes how she makes decisions, takes risks, recovers from pressure and moves through her day.

That’s where the data gets interesting.

Across those 101,000 anonymously journalled words, Véa identified the cognitive signatures of how pressure gets metabolised – not into symptoms, but into patterns.

Overgeneralisation, fortune-telling, catastrophising: the interpretive architecture through which strain quietly becomes self-doubt, avoidance and reduced capacity.

This is not a wellness story – it’s a data story. And it points to a layer of women’s health that has been consistently underinstrumented.

Véa is an neuroscience-backed AI journal that uses semantic embeddings and a state classifier trained on emotional data to read language the way a clinician might – not for keywords but for interpretive patterns.

Each entry is stored as an emotional vector, building a longitudinal map of how a user’s inner state shifts over time.

That is what made this dataset possible.

What the Data Shows

Mental load is often described in domestic terms – the remembering, the planning, the anticipating. But in practice it is also deeply interpretive.

It lives in the ongoing internal work of pre-empting what might go wrong, reading emotional atmospheres, managing self-presentation and correcting internally before anything external has even happened.

That is not just emotional strain. It is a form of continuous cognitive expenditure.

To make that visible, Véa analysed 101,000 anonymously journalled words across 150+ beta testers over 6 months.

These were not a homogenous group: new mothers, neurodivergent women, career-switchers, high performers navigating demanding roles – different lives, different pressures, same underlying patterns.

That breadth matters – it means what we found is not a niche signal. It is structural.

Across that dataset, Véa identified more than 3,000 separate instances of cognitive distortions – recurring interpretive patterns that emerge under pressure.

The five most frequently detected were overgeneralisation, fortune-telling, “should” statements, catastrophising and black-and-white thinking.

On paper these may sound like standard CBT terminology. But taken together they reveal something more significant than stress.

They show that a large part of women’s mental and emotional load is not only what women are carrying externally – it is how rapidly and repeatedly that load gets cognitively organised into threat, failure and self-correction.

What drains women is not just the event. It is the meaning-making around the event.

The Cost of Cognitive Distortions

Overgeneralisation: when one setback becomes a self-story

The most frequent pattern was overgeneralisation: turning one event into a broader conclusion.

One awkward meeting becomes “I’m not good enough”. One rejection becomes “this always happens to me”.

Under stress, the prefrontal cortex loses flexibility, making it harder to hold context and alternative interpretations.

The brain defaults to faster, simplified conclusions, often collapsing a single event into a broader narrative.

For high-performing women, this matters because it directly affects risk-taking and recovery. If one setback becomes a signal of incompetence, the cost of visibility increases.

This aligns with workplace data showing women are more likely to self-deselect from opportunities after negative feedback or perceived underperformance.

Overgeneralisation is not just negative thinking. It is a reduction in cognitive flexibility that limits forward movement.

Fortune-telling: managing problems before they exist

The second pattern was: predicting negative outcomes without evidence, e.g. “It’s going to go badly” or “They’re not going to respond” when you have no facts to back that up.

The brain operates on predictive models, continuously forecasting outcomes.

Under stress, these predictions become threat-biased and less accurate, prioritising avoidance over exploration.

For women, this overlaps with documented anticipatory mental load – the cognitive work of planning, monitoring and pre-empting problems.

The result is inefficiency: energy is spent solving for outcomes that have not occurred.

For high performers, this reduces focus, presence and execution quality because attention is allocated to imagined scenarios rather than current tasks.

“Should” statements: the language of self-surveillance

“Should” statements reflect top-down self-monitoring where behaviour is continuously evaluated against internalised standards. Under sustained pressure, this shifts from regulation to self-criticism, increasing cognitive load.

For women, these standards are often compounded. Performance, emotional regulation and relational behaviour are all being evaluated simultaneously.

Workplace data shows women face higher expectations to balance competence with likability and are more likely to experience competence-based microaggressions.

This creates a loop of self-surveillance, splitting attention between doing and evaluating.

That split is cognitively expensive.

Catastrophising: when the system defaults to threat

Catastrophising reflects rapid escalation to worst-case scenarios.

Under cognitive load, the brain shifts toward amygdala-driven threat processing, reducing the ability to hold ambiguity and increasing urgency-based interpretation.

For high-performing women managing multiple demands, even small uncertainties can trigger escalation because they are processed on top of existing load.

The outcome is distorted prioritisation. Attention is redirected toward perceived threats rather than actual strategic work.

Black-and-white thinking: the rigidity behind perfection

The final major pattern was black-and-white thinking: interpreting situations in binaries, e.g “I’m either doing well or failing”.

It reflects reduced cognitive flexibility, a key function of the prefrontal cortex that allows for nuance and adaptive thinking.

It makes recovery harder and leaves very little room for partial progress, mixed feelings or ordinary human inconsistency.

For high-performing women, this often intersects with perfection pressure. Partial progress is discounted and anything below optimal performance is interpreted as failure.

This creates rigidity. It limits iteration, slows decision-making and makes sustained performance harder, not better.

What This Actually Means

Clinical surveys can tell you a woman is stressed. Journalling treated as longitudinal data tells you something different – it shows you how that stress is being interpreted, repeated and compounded over time.

A survey captures a moment. Language tracked across weeks and months captures a pattern.

That distinction is what makes this dataset structurally different from existing research: it surfaces the cognitive layer that self-report instruments are not designed to reach.

For corporate health and wellbeing

These patterns do not stay at home.

Overgeneralisation after a difficult meeting, fortune-telling before a high-stakes presentation, black-and-white thinking under performance pressure – these are showing up in the workplace every day, invisibly.

For organisations investing in women’s development and retention, this data reframes the conversation.

It is not enough to offer resilience training or mental health days.

The question is whether your wellbeing infrastructure is designed to address the interpretive load that sits underneath performance and whether the interventions you offer are actually built around how women experience that load.

Because that is where capacity is actually being lost.

For clinical and health frameworks

The most widely used depression screener in the world is nine questions long. It captures a snapshot.

What longitudinal language data offers is something clinical instruments have never been designed to provide – continuity.

A running record of how cognitive patterns shift, accumulate and respond to pressure over time, before they become a diagnosis.

That has real implications for how we screen, how we intervene early and how we build a picture of women’s mental health that goes beyond the biological and into the cognitive.