Sourdough Therapy: 7 Mental Health Lessons to be Learned from Baking Bread
Sourdough baking, should you choose to heed the call, provides an opportunity to reflect, look within, and improve your emotional wellbeing.
“[Breadmaking is] one of those almost hypnotic businesses, like a dance from some ancient ceremony. It leaves you filled with one of the world's sweetest smells... there is no chiropractic treatment, no Yoga exercise, no hour of meditation in a music-throbbing chapel that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread.” — M.F.K. Fisher
Amazingly, the foundation of sourdough bread — the starter — can be created from two ingredients: water and flour. That’s it.
Mix flour and water together and, with proper feeding over time, the wild bacteria already present within the flour is cultivated and grows into a thriving community. This mixture of flour and water that you feed over time – with more flour and water – becomes your starter. If you feed your bacterial friends regularly, the starter ferments and gas bubbles are created that make the bread rise.
It’s fascinating … and also delicious.
I started my sourdough starter with whole wheat flour and water, in December 2019, with no idea that, with the COVID19 pandemic, many other people would be joining me in the endeavor.
I had no idea how much joy this project would bring. I suspect I’m not alone.
Creating this starter, feeding it regularly, creating delicious baked goods (banana bread! pancakes!) with the discard, and attempting to bake a light and chewy — yet also crusty — sourdough loaf has taken up residence in my tiny kitchen, and a giant space in my life. It’s snugly found it’s way into my weekly routine, and become a living part of our household.
Sourdough baking – and cooking and baking, in general — produces results. See the references to banana bread!, pancakes!, and sourdough bread! above. Concrete results. Creations you have made with your own hands that you can munch with relish and share with love.
There are other results as well.
Sourdough baking, should you choose to heed the call, provides an opportunity to reflect, look within, and improve your emotional wellbeing.
Learning to bake sourdough bread can teach you …
How to bake a loaf of bread
Creating concrete, tangible, non-abstract, touchable (and equally ‘eatable!’) results with your own hands is ridiculously satisfying.
We know that making things, working with our hands, is correlated with increased emotional wellbeing.
Patience
Two months had gone by before my starter was active enough for me to attempt baking a loaf of bread. And, the process of baking sourdough bread is spread over two days.
In this world characterized by immediate gratification, we must create the means by which we deliberately slow down and wait. Build anticipation. Recognize the benefits of waiting to see what unfolds. Understand that many, many things – often the very best things – do not happen instantaneously.
How to Fail
My first (several) loaves were so dense they could have served as doorstops. After two days of folding, resting, and waiting, I – on numerous occasions – ended up with loaves of bread that could have served as stand-ins for my dumbbells. They wouldn’t toast. They wouldn’t absorb egg and milk so I could turn them into French toast. They were tasty but the texture was a big, fat failure.
We need to be okay with failing. Expecting everything to go perfectly, especially when we are new to something, is a setup for unreasonable expectations, extreme disappointment, and negative emotional wellbeing.
In fact, we need to relish failing. Because when we fail, we learn.
Perseverance
I could have given up after creating my multipurpose doorstop / dumbbell loaves.
But then, I would have never succeeded in creating the ultimate light and chewy, yet beautifully crusty, loaf of sourdough bread. It was perfection! (We may have consumed it in one sitting …)
And … I haven’t been able to recreate it (as perfectly) since. And with my repeated attempts I am improving, discovering what was magic about that one perfect loaf, what I need to adjust, and how I can do better.
“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” … Legit advice.
If we fail and simply walk away, we lose. Big time.
With perseverance, and the ability to embrace failure as an opportunity to practice and learn, we expand our world. We remove limitations. We grow immensely.
Accountability
I must feed and nurture my starter regularly. If I don’t it may begin to smell like acetone nail polish remover and die. (This is especially true in the beginning if you’re starting your own starter and your immune system boosting, healthy bacteria friends do not yet have a thriving community.).
We seem to have a much easier time being accountable to other people than to ourselves. It’s easier to skip a solo workout you’ve scheduled than to not show up if you’re meeting others, yes?
Doing what you say and saying what you mean, maybe even most especially to yourself, is a quality worth building.
Risk Taking
What happens if I play around with my feeding schedule? What happens if I put my starter in the refrigerator? If I adjust the flour to water to starter ratio? If I change the baking temperature, do I get a crustier loaf?
I could stick to the recipe. But the fun, the journey, the experience, the excitement of learning to bake sourdough is playing around, taking risks, changing it up and seeing what happens.
I specialize in treating anxiety. And I know many of my clients struggling with anxiety would give a huge SHUDDER reading “seeing what happens.”
But, we have to give up control (or the fallacy of control … because the control we think we have isn’t real …).
We must take risks.
Why?
Because when we do we go places we never anticipated, we get results we could not have predicted, and we live our fullest, best lives.
Trusting Your Intuition
The recipe says to autolyse (mixing just your flour and water together and letting it sit in a bowl for a while before adding your starter when you’re making your bread dough). The experts tout the benefits of autolysing.
I got my beautiful perfect loaf the one time I didn’t autolyse.
The experts may be right. Maybe autolysing is essential. But … I now know I get lighter, airier loaves when I don’t do it. And, for now at least, I’m going with it.
Many of us don’t trust ourselves. Many of us defer to others. Many of us do what we think we should do, according to what others will think, what society at large says … and ignore the desires of our own hearts.
Listen to your inner voice. Don’t ignore it. It knows what’s best for you.
Look for the work, the hobbies, the endeavors that light you up, that challenge you, that give you opportunities to fail, pick yourself up, and try again. Embrace the process of moving forward into the allowing, the unknown, the uncertainty.
You will find glimpses of your true self there. You can hear your inner voice there. And, with time and practice, your voice gets stronger, your true self solidifies. And your life expands.
While crunching on a thick, chewy, butter-slathered slice of sourdough.
Sourdough Specific Resources:
I’ve found King Arthur Flour’s Sourdough Guide to be immensely helpful: https://www.kingarthurflour.com/learn/guides/sourdough
And, Mike Greenfield’s YouTube Channel — Pro Home Cooks — and specifically his Sourdough playlist — is solid gold: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt_lOWx8jR_PQQqNquacTdaUuGWCD-V1S
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This blog post is offered for educational purposes only and should not be confused as therapy or psychological care.