If You Can’t Afford A Therapist, Try Learning How To Cook Instead
It’s kind of a sad time in the world, so everyone deserves a therapist, right?
But not everyone can get one. Whether you have not enough time on your hands, or just can’t afford it, there are still a number of things you can do to feel more calm and happy in your daily life. VICE’s food network, Munchies, recently did an interview with a culinary therapist who talks about the ways in which learning to prepare and cook your own meals is a real, effective, and developing form of therapy.
Culinary art therapy, or C.A.T is an exercise in behavioral action, otherwise known as traditional cognitive therapy, which is pretty popular already. It’s behavioral activation—or maybe better known as traditional cognitive therapy—is popular with therapists looking to engage their patient in methods that break them out of their normal routine.
Another Vice article from a few months back profiled someone who cited cooking as one of the ways they battled their depression.
“I’ve found that the physical act of cooking alleviates symptoms of stress and anxiety almost immediately. Food is such an inextricable part of the human condition, however, that the simple sensation of having some meat and vegetables sizzling on a pan is also affecting me on a deeper emotional level,” Jackson Connor writes.
He mentions that he could tell his eating habits were indicative of his mental state when he realized he was ordering Seamless three times a day, and how eating food in isolation so constantly is probably not what you want to be doing in life.
“I happen to think it’s brilliant to try to engage someone [who is depressed] in cooking. For the time that you’re doing it, it really does circumvent the symptoms of depression: the inertia, the lack of energy, the lack of focus, the lack of interest,” Norman Sussman, the director of the Treatment Resistant Depression Program at the NYU School of Medicine said.
Hey, if it’s good enough for Chrissy Teigen, it’s good enough for me.
