Telling someone with anxiety to “relax” isn’t very productive. While I suspect such sentiment comes from a well-meaning place, it fundamentally misses an important fact about anxiety – attempting to “relax” only magnifies the things that are fueling the stress.
The COVID pandemic brought another pandemic along with it - a huge increase in the number of people reporting mental health issues, including anxiety. Regardless of how well you think you’ve weathered the past two years there’s almost no doubt you’ve struggled with some level of stress, uncertainty, confusion, and powerless wheel-spinning. So much to think about and often very little to do about it.
Many of us have taken some refuge in hobbies over the last few years. Some endeavours have been more successful than others (I’m going to do yoga EVERY DAY vs. I’m going to watch all 86 episodes of The Sopranos). Some of us found ourselves cooking and baking, particularly in the early days when we were only venturing out for essentials and doom-scrolling the news about hoarding, ventilators, and impending mass casualties. Sorry kids, we can’t go anywhere or do anything, but we can make cupcakes!
We were cooking like our lives depended on it because, in a very real sense, they did.
Home cooking and baking were our touchstones of normal life and many of us, myself included, threw ourselves into it with heretofore unmatched enthusiasm. The empty shelves in the grocery store threw even the most level-headed into a little panic spiral, leading from empty bread shelves, to empty flour shelves, to empty yeast shelves, to “SOURDOUGH STARTER FASTER HOW TO” Google searches. It was a heady time, but not in a good way.
But why was cooking so important to so many of us, and what can we take from our experience of the last two years?
Cooking is an accomplishment. Whether cooking for you is assembling a sandwich or making a multi-course luxury meal, everyone has to eat. Cooking is a tangible form of self care that can be as simple or as complex as your time and circumstances allow. It produces a reward - an actual thing - for the effort expended.
Cooking is a multi-sensory experience. There are few other activities that engage so many senses at the same time. Taste is usually the odd one out in sensory experience because we don’t put that many things in our mouth (ok… most of us don’t), but the immersive experience of cooking makes it hard to completely zone out. Even if we’ve got the news on in the background or negative thoughts cycling through out minds the combined physical and mental effort of making a meal can push the more intrusive mental noise aside, even if only for a while.
Cooking is creative. It’s no secret that people who engage in some kind of creative activity are happier. Cooking is creative both by design (trying or inventing a new dish) and often by necessity (substitutions and modifications). You’re still an artist even if your creativity is limited to cutting veggies into amusing shapes to entertain your ungrateful children.
Cooking changes your relationship with food. The mere act of cooking rather than ordering in or microwaving something frozen improves your confidence about food, which improves your relationship with food. Cooking and being confident (or at least comfortable) with your abilities can lessen much of the stress around mealtimes and make them enjoyable rather than burdensome. And once you have a less-fraught relationship with food it is easier to make healthy choices.
Cooking teaches patience. The water won’t boil any faster. The chicken will burn on the outside and be raw in the middle. You can’t frost cupcakes when they are still warm. Cooking and baking demand that we slow down and let natural processes take their course. We can’t will the laws of chemistry to hurry up with a click.
Cooking is about connection. Even during the darkest days of the pandemic food continued to connect us. Whether we were furiously baking porch drop- off treats for the neighbours, swapping recipes online, or cooking dinner for our families (again, and again, and again…) or our little quarantine bubble, the making and giving and receiving of food took on a more poignant meaning.
Whether COVID is over depends on who you ask, but what is most certainly not over are the lingering effects on our sense of self, community, and purpose. So as we start to pick up the pieces of what we used to call normal life, it’s worth considering what role things like cooking had on our mental health, and what we can take from that experience in the future.
So next time you’re in the kitchen and have a moment to think, take a few seconds to consider all the benefits of cooking for your mental state, and which of them resonate most for you. It may not be “relaxing” exactly, but it may just put you a little more at ease.
Spot on! Throwing oneself into cooking and baking was a huge distraction and chance to accomplish many techniques. My veterinarian did ask that I stop dropping off baked goods - as he claimed he gain 20 pounds from all the bread, cakes, cookies, sweet rolls, and other items.