For those juggling a full-time job or a family, finding time to cook healthy and nutritious meals in the kitchen can often feel hard to come by. Whether you’re prioritising a work-life balance and want to free up your evenings at home or feel immense pressure from the need to feed your family, there has been tons of research on the links between stress and cooking.
However, juggling your physical and mental health can sometimes clash, as while your body requires you to fuel it with a nutritious and balanced diet, stress levels may not always allow you to. Cooking is often also considered a practical solution for de-stressing and unwinding.
In support of Stress Awareness Month, we’re partnering with KitchenAid to raise free donations for Mental Health UK. To get involved, simply shop KitchenAid products through Savoo from April 1st to April 30th, and we’ll send extra 2% donations to Mental Health UK throughout this period.
Whether you want to explore the fun of cooking and learn new skills in the kitchen by treating yourself to a handy gadget, or you want to cut down your time in the kitchen with the help of a new appliance to spend more time relaxing – make a difference, starting from the kitchen.
Cooking for coping: how to destress in the kitchen
While ensuring you have a good work/life balance while getting enough exercise and sleep daily are essential components of reducing stress, claimed by Mental Health UK, mental-wellbeing can also be cooked up in the kitchen as research indicates that cooking can be a beneficial de-stressor. While culinary therapy is beginning to grow in popularity amongst occupational therapists, who work with people to help them overcome the challenges, tasks and activities of everyday life, it’s still relatively new in the grand scheme of things.
As per evidence from Psychology Today, there is a clear link between improving your mental health and stress levels with cooking.
Whether you’re one to:
- Find specific elements of cooking relaxing, e.g. baking sweet treats on a sunny spring day.
- Use cooking as an outlet for creative expression, trying new recipes, techniques and broadening your horizons.
- Get lost in a recipe and use cooking as a distraction, saving you focusing on and mulling over worries.
- Feel mentally and physically healthier when you pay more attention to what you eat and nutrition, enabling you with more energy to take on other stress-busting activities, such as exercise.
Cut down your time in the kitchen with KitchenAid
Whether you confidently know your way around the kitchen or are in the process of finding your way, now is the perfect time to start. In support of Stress Awareness Month, you can get an exclusive 10% off your KitchenAid orders when you shop through Savoo using our discount code.
KitchenAid is renowned for its range of premium kitchen appliances and best-selling blenders that make cooking healthy and nutritious meals a breeze. Treat yourself to an iconic KitchenAid mixer or blender and cut down your time in the kitchen or elevate your skills and recipes with the support of a top-of-the-range appliance. Whether you’re attempting to free up your evenings and spend less time cooking or plan to trial broadening your cooking abilities to unwind and de-stress – KitchenAid appliances are ideal for both purposes.
If you need some inspiration and don’t know where to start, KitchenAid has a wide range of recipes on its website that are easy to achieve using your KitchenAid appliance. From the 2-colour power food smoothie, which only takes 10 minutes to prepare using a KitchenAid blender, to some delicious, creamy and buttery sweet potato mash, that also only takes 10 minutes to prepare using a KitchenAid hand mixer – you don’t have to dedicate a lot of time to conjure up healthy and nutritious food and drink.
Mental Health UK – what is stress?
Support Mental Health UK this Stress Awareness Month with free donations
Stress Awareness Month is an annual mental health awareness event in April since 1992.
Mental Health UK aims to increase public understanding of the causes of stress in modern society while providing and supporting people with possible cures, coping strategies and solutions.
Everyone faces stressful situations in their day-to-day life, and according to Mental Health UK data from the UK’s largest ever stress-based survey, ‘74% of people said stress has made them feel overwhelmed and unable to cope‘. Whether it’s specific lifestyle factors, work worries, juggling the balance of life and families, or anything else, stress affects the majority of us at some point in our lives, which is why it’s so important to increase public awareness of how stress can affect someone and ways to manage it.
Mental Health UK – how to spot the signs of stress
Mental Health UK supplies several small and easy-applicable tips to help get the balance right in your life in a bid to decrease stress levels:
- The importance of a work-life balance – don’t let burnout catch up with you. Mental Health UK claims that ‘a year’s worth of lunch breaks equates to almost 6 extra weeks of annual leave‘, so simply stepping away from your desk for an hour to take a walk or do something you enjoy is a simple and practical way to achieve a better work/life balance.
- Using exercise to reduce stress – while getting your heart pumping through exercise to combat stress can sound counterintuitive, research suggests that exercise can actually help to reduce stress and make you feel more relaxed. According to Harvard Health Publishing, ‘unique capacity to exhilarate and relax, to provide stimulation and calm, to counter depression and dissipate stress.’ So, once you get past the initial stages of getting fit, building some stamina and growing stronger, exercise is an easy way to incorporate a de-stressor into your everyday routine. Better yet, it doesn’t have to be anything too rigorous to make a difference, Harvard Health continues by stating that a simple 20-minute walk or light jog daily ‘can clear the mind and reduce stress’.
- Get a good night’s sleep – while getting active is proven to have positive effects on stress, taking the time to rest and relax is also just as important. Sleep Foundation states that insomnia can often be related to stress, and relates to facing ‘difficulty getting to sleep or staying asleep for long enough to feel refreshed the next morning’, a common issue affecting roughly one in three people in the UK – as defined by NHS Inform. Without enough sleep each night, feelings of overtiredness can cause bad moods, snapping, being less productive and feeling emotional. For some easy adjustments to improve your sleep and decrease stress, Mental Health UK provides several suggestions:
- Go to bed at around the same time each night to create a regular sleep schedule.
- Make sure your bedroom is calm, quiet and relaxing.
- Cut out caffeine in the evening before bed.
- Track your sleep in a diary if you’re concerned to see behaviour patterns.
- Create a wind-down routine by finding something that relaxes you before bed, this could be a warm bath, reading a book, listening to music or some mindfulness, meditation or yoga.
You can help Mental Health UK continue their vital work supporting those facing stress and mental health concerns by using our exclusive 10% KitchenAid discount code to raise extra 2% donations for Mental Health UK throughout April.
If you need some inspiration in the kitchen, check out our blog with KitchenAid for the top tips on cooking sustainably.
And, don’t forget about our Stress Awareness Month blog from 2022 to see how we supported Mental Health UK last year with the help of Buyagift and Secret Sales.
