Are you the type of person that loves to bake cookies, pies, and bread for friends and family members no matter what time of the year it is? If you look for any excuse to fire up your oven, science tells us it’s about a lot more than just supplying those you love with sweets, in fact, there are a lot of psychological benefits. Let’s take a look at them! (And yeah, you can go ahead and preheat the oven, you know you want to.)
Baking is a great way to make the rest of the world go away. It requires you to focus on directions that have to be followed in a certain order, and before you know it, all you care about is what your brownie batter looks like, and not whatever you were stressing about just moments ago.
You don’t need us to tell you how important creative expression is for our overall well-being, but what you may not have considered is that baking is a form of self-expression, just like music or painting. (Baking is just way more delicious and smells incredible!)
We’re about to get really deep here, but believe it or not, baking gives your life meaning and establishes connections with other people. Baking allows you to visualize a happy moment in the future, like when your friends or family take that first creamy bite of cheesecake, so when you bake, you also feel like you’re contributing something good to the world.
If you find that you’re the type of person that sometimes struggles with finding the right words at times, have you also noticed that you tend to bake for people during certain life events instead? This is totally normal. Psychologists often refer to the cultural norm of taking people food when a loved one passes away, we do this because the food can do the talking when we can’t.
Person to person, culture to culture, we may not agree on a lot, but you know where most of us can find at least some common ground? That’s right, among food. So not only can food serve as an expression of love, but it’s something we can all relate to. It’s hard to have bad blood among a group of folks you’re sharing a fresh strawberry cake with.
Few things are as wonderful as filling your home with the smell of pumpkin bread or chocolate chip cookies, but neurologists have found that these things we like to bake, and the smells associated with them, are often incredibly nostalgic reminding people of their childhood. And who doesn’t want to be reminded of a time before bills and responsibilities?