Definition
Cooking regularly can improve your mood, confidence and diet.
How to Do It
Regularly cook your own food, or food for others. There are many resources online for recipes and cooking tips. For example, allrecipes have over 40,000 recipes on site.
Benefits
Time Commitment
Between 10 and 60 minutes.
Why it works
- While cooking, you are often focused on the task at hand. This reduces anxiety as it makes it harder to get caught in unhelpful thought patterns [2].
- Once you’ve completed cooking, you may feel a small sense of pride, as well as an increased feeling of self-efficacy [3].
- Cooking more regularly makes you more conscious of what goes into your food, which allows you to make beneficial diet decisions [1].
Suggested Frequency
At least 4 times a week.
Supporting Studies and Articles
Side Effects
Burns are not uncommon while cooking, and in rare cases fires can start.
Gurus/Celebrities/Doing it
Julia Roberts
Snoop Dogg
Chrissy Teigen
Michael Bublé
Notes
Cooking classes or community kitchens are a great way to socialize and meet new people. Otherwise, just inviting a couple of friends over for an ambitious kitchen project should improve your mood even more.
