Revolutionize Your Cooking! Psychologist’s Method to Stop Seeing It as a Chore

“The kitchen is the room where we spend most of our time at home,” notes psychosociologist Christèle Albaret. It’s where we often gather almost every day after work! It serves as a decompression chamber between our workday and the time we have dinner and then go to bed. “Just like exercise, cooking is beneficial for both physical and mental health,” the expert confirms. However, the issue is that this space can often be overwhelmed by our daily worries, preventing us from enjoying cooking. Thus, preparing the evening meal becomes yet another task that adds to our mental burden. To stop seeing this daily activity as a chore and to start enjoying cooking again, the expert shared a simple but life-changing tip.

To make the kitchen a place of relaxation and sharing, Christèle Albaret suggests something seemingly trivial yet incredibly effective: turn it into a no-phone zone! Indeed, “Our smartphones disconnect us from ourselves and prevent us from enjoying the moment,” she explains. By keeping it out of the room, we can truly focus on what we’re doing and enjoy quality time, whether alone or with loved ones. In practice, this can sometimes be challenging since we now look up most of our recipes online. To cook without distractions, consider turning on the ‘do not disturb’ mode on your phone to block external notifications. If you have a printer, you can also prepare your favorite recipe cards in advance.

Another tip for enjoying cooking? Treat it like a game! For instance, you could establish a “relaxation challenge” where the person who is the most stressed has to put down the spatula and tell a funny story while someone else takes over, she suggests. Another fun game to lighten the mood? The “cooking battle”: each person prepares a part of the meal, and the others have to guess the surprise ingredient added. Lastly, to keep things light-hearted, she recommends setting up a “failed dish tradition”: the idea is to try a new recipe once a month, accepting from the start that it might be a culinary disaster… or a moment filled with laughter, she hints.

To reduce mental load in the kitchen, the key concept is sharing, concludes the psychosociologist. Not just sharing tasks, but also sharing an activity as a family, where everyone can express themselves and have fun. After all, isn’t it said that dishes taste better when made with love?