How to Be Happy Lesson #11: Get Baked
No, it’s not what you’re thinking, although that might indeed be a route to happiness for some. No, “Get Baked” refers to this recipe for feeling good: “Bake, Drink, Share, Eat, Drink Some More.” This motto belongs to the Sunday Baking Club. The SBC is (or was at least — the most recent post on their website is dated 2016) a club in England that bakes (baked) together Sunday mornings after receiving their “theme” assignment the day before:
As the members work away in their own kitchens on their cakes and pies, they’re encouraged to tweet about their progress. Once they’ve finished, however successful the results, they can submit a photo, which is then retweeted. A shortlist of the day’s top bakes is then compiled and members are asked to vote. The winner is awarded a virtual golden spoon for their efforts.
The founder of SBC, Dominque Johns, writes (wrote), “I’m never happier than being in my kitchen baking something lovely to eat. Our club is all about sharing that same pleasure with others.” At the end of an article in The Telegraph about the SBC, we get this extra bit of advice: “The easiest way to improve your mood — and your life — is to take time each day to focus on the simple things that bring you joy.” So, I could really take credit for offering two lessons on how to be happy here today but, being the modest person that I am, I won’t.
So, why does baking make people happy? Well, one source with the somewhat suspect label “Sugary Logic” lays out three reasons:
- Baking is creativity. And that creativity can have mental health benefits, ergo, “a little creativity each day can go a long way towards happiness and satisfaction in the bustle of daily life.”
- Baking is meditation. Baking requires precision and precision requires focus and focus requires presence. “The act of mindfulness in that present moment can…have a result in stress reduction.”
- Baking [for others] is bonding. The act of giving increases your feeling of wellbeing, relieves stress, and increases your sense of having a meaningful life and being connected to other people.
I like the last one in particular because it means you can have the joy of baking without the heartbreak of excessive calorie intake.
Certain foods also have an uplifting effect on us. Take this rather strange example from a 2012 Washington Post article titled “The Psychology of Cupcakes”:
San Francisco psychotherapist Brooke Miller says cupcakes represent a perfectly proportioned sense of self. “With so much stimulation and expectation — material wealth, keeping up with the Joneses, Hollywood and our own parents’ expectations of us — many people turn to food . . . to manage the emotion that comes up with living a life they assume is under par. In an interesting and delicious way, cupcakes are a sweet example of what it looks like to be good enough exactly the way you are. They keep us ‘boundaried’ and feeling contained, like we don’t need to do, eat or prove anything more than what is unwrapped in this little wrapper of joy and sugar.”
Ah…so I guess we feel good about not being as bad as we might have been. As with anything, moderation is the key. So, if one were buying cupcakes, the mini ones at Publix would be the right choice over the gargantuan ones offered at Key West Cakes.
Be careful, though. Cupcakes can be seductive in an unhealthy way not related to diet. Here’s the opinion of another psychotherapist:
“The popularity of cupcakes directly tracks the rise in cultural narcissism that has resulted from the Internet’s impact on our individual and cultural psyche,” he says. “Through our over-reliance on the Internet, we’ve become a culture of emotionally disconnected individuals who live in socially isolated cyber-fantasy worlds. The fantasy worlds we create for ourselves on the Internet are an equivalent of the modern myth of Narcissus where we spend hours in an isolated aggrandizement of self.”
Cupcakes represent the mythical pool into which Narcissus fell and drowned, Hokemeyer says.
“Through cupcakes, seemingly innocent little ‘treats,’ we can project fantasies of who and what we desire to be. Instead of connecting us to others, however, cupcakes keep us separate and add to our sense of isolation.”
So, no cupcaking alone, got it? Ever. Else the mythical drowning pool awaits. This prompts me to offer Lesson #11 on how to be happy as a modified version of the SBC motto: bake small cupcakes, drink, invite your friends over, drink, share the treats, and drink some more. Or perhaps better yet, invite your friends over, drink, bake cupcakes together, drink, and then share the treats among yourselves while drinking some more. For an extra feel-good boost, you and your friends could take the cupcakes out and share them with random people, making sure, of course, to drink before you do.
(Image: Anders Zorn — Bread baking (1889). Public domain.)
[Published originally on RatBlurt™, February 20, 2019. Don’t forget to visit my other blog: TNTBAD (Try Not to Be a Dick).]
