How to Battle Kitchen Burnout (And Still Get Dinner on the Table)

I’m staring into my freezer at eight a.m., pawing through vacuum-packed lumps of chicken and bags of frozen bananas to find anything that might easily turn into dinner. I know I need to use the greens I got last weekend. I dream of someone else fitting all the pieces together.

I’m not cooking tonight, I say to my husband, who is lost in his screen, trying to fit in a few early hours of work before he wakes our daughter. He nods absently.

I start to put away a cookbook that's sitting out, but stop and scan the photos, picturing how I used to love shutting myself in the kitchen, rolling a tray of herb-dotted meatballs to simmer all afternoon. Spaghetti. There’s a jar of sauce on the shelf. Just make spaghetti.

That night, I go through the motions again.

“Burnout is not the same as stress,” psychotherapist Anna Lindberg Cedar explains to me on the phone. “We experience stress with the adjustment to any life change, positive or negative. Getting married causes stress. Job promotions. But with burnout, you stop functioning. You stop doing the things that you typically care about, or you do them, but not very well, or without much feeling. You begin to lose touch with who you are.”

“The most painful part,” she notes, is that burnout “attacks things that we typically love so much, the activities that used to bring us joy and pleasure.”

I’ll stop here to recognize: It’s a huge privilege to have a fridge with fresh food in it, a cupboard stocked with boxes of pasta. So many families right now are struggling with food insecurity, on top of the pandemic and all of its attendant crises. But whatever you’re facing right now—whether you’re in isolation on your own, or out advocating for racial justice; whether you’re facing a terrifying work situation or smoky orange skies, or juggling childcare and remote learning and all the rest—it’s likely your surge capacity is depleted. And if, like me, cooking was one of your outlets in the past, it’s possible, after all these months of meals, you’ve lost your kitchen mojo, too.

On Instagram, my friend Rachel Khong captioned a recent photo of a home cooked-meal: “Can you believe we have to eat every day?” To many of us, meals—and the decisions required to make them—feel like waves folding one after another onto the shore. It’s relentless. And while a few of my friends still seem to be enjoying their pandemic cooking (and baking) projects, as things unravel, I’m seeing more notes about burnout on my Instagram feed. We are all struggling to feel any spark.

I ask Cedar what we can do. “You do need to give yourself some form of pleasure and rest, even when you’re in a crisis,” she explains. “Giving yourself the time to have access to another sensation”—a moment of pleasure—"is going to be really important for your sustainability.”

And that means, she says, acting against what burnout is telling you: “I’m not asking anyone to pretend that they feel good or positive if they don’t,” she says. Instead, she urges those struggling with burnout to “do the actions of someone who is used to feeling pleasure from certain activities, like cooking, until those activities become pleasure-inducing again.”

That doesn’t just mean pushing through the slog, Cedar explains. To access the joy you once felt in the kitchen, Cedar recommends grounding exercises: Mindfulness, basically. Burnout can feel numbing, even dissociating, and the first step against it is to tease the senses, taking note of every sensation in your body. Cooking with a focus on each sensation, Cedar says, “can help you find respite even in a chaotic world.”

To try it, she recommends setting really strong boundaries around the kitchen. “Lock the door, turn off the news, tell everyone you’re not available.” Treat yourself to a few of your favorite ingredients: the juiciest tomatoes, a fresh jar of spices. Then zero in on what you’re doing.

These tomatoes are a whole mood.

Photo by Joseph De Leo, Food Styling by Anna Stockwell

The feelings of burnout very well may still be there, Cedar says, but as you cook, try to return your attention over and over again to the sound of the knife against the cutting board, the scent of the tomato at its stem—and the memories that come with those sensations. Even if they’re uncomfortable. Even if you begin to feel grief about the day and the year you’re having instead of the one you’d hoped for.

Cedar notes that this kind of cooking isn’t really about getting dinner on the table. The goal, instead, is “to make contact again with pleasurable experience.”

I wonder if that’s enough. Then I talk to chef Anita Lo, whose book, Solo, is a reminder that cooking can be a source of pleasure no matter how many plates are at your table, or how many times you have to make dinner. She’s holding up okay. She tells me she’s been making a lot of fresh pasta lately: “I love that tactile feeling of bringing a dough together and developing the gluten,” she says. “You can feel it coming together in your hands, and feel when it gets to that silky-bouncy perfection that’s needed for good pasta, or dumplings.” She sounds like she’s paying attention. It sounds like that’s helping.

I think, in part, I’m feeling detached from the kitchen because food hasn’t been a thread of connection with people outside my household in recent months. I used to have a dinner party once a week or more, filling all the chairs at a table meant for six or eight, not three. But I moved with my family across the country this past year, in part due to some medical issues that carry unknown COVID risk. We haven’t seen the few local friends we have. There have been no picnics, no stoop drinks.

“Every culture uses food as a form of healing and connection,” Cedar reminds me. “Before COVID, if we had a funeral or a wedding, we would have potlucks and get together and try all the food, and talk about recipes.” Food has always been a social experience. But now, Cedar says, we have to figure out a workaround.

“My mother had her birthday early on in quarantine,” Caroline Randall Williams, co-author of Soul Food Love, tells me. “She has been very rigorous about protecting her health, so we planned days ahead, trying to create a ritual rather than mourning what was lost.” They each set their own tables, with phones for dialing in, and each had a glass of wine alongside a lovely dinner: “She told me about what she cooked for herself, and I told her about what I’d cooked for myself, and we celebrated that shared moment together.” Virtual dinners like this can feel silly, “but that’s literally what we have right now, so it’s not silly,” Williams insists.

Another day, another bowl of oatmeal.

Photo by Joseph De Leo

Beyond virtual dinner parties, though, Williams is trying to tap into a deeper social well. She says that some of the monotony of food during the pandemic has connected her to memories of the past: “I remember, when I was 8 years old or so, asking my great grandmother what it was like to live through the Depression,” she says. Her grandmother had responded that they ate a lot of oatmeal, a lot of pickles, and sometimes, an orange with a peppermint stick as a big treat. “There were bleak moments in late March, early April,” Randall says, that “I did not want oatmeal again, and I would think about my great grandmother, and think: We know how to do this in our family. She had her six babies during that time, and she lived to 98 years old. When I’m making my oatmeal, I’m reminded of inherited fortitude.”

There can be comfort in cooking up family memories: Cedar says she’s been making the potatoes her ancestors filled up on during hard times. Williams bought herself some snapper fillets: “Baked red snapper was one of my grandfather’s favorite dishes, and I inherited the love of that dish. I baked it in tinfoil with a ton of garlic and a ton of parsley, and my heart sang.”

But both Cedar and Williams emphasize the importance of taking a break. “When you’re depleted and running on fumes,” Cedar says, “you can start to feel resentful: you’re doing something you don’t have the reserves to do.” It’s okay, she reminds me, to not feel okay. And it’s okay to eat toast for dinner.

“Find something you really like that is plain and deeply simple,” Williams advises. It could be microwaving a sweet potato or simply heating up soup. “That counts as a triumph!” she says. “Congratulations, you did it, you made it easy on yourself.”

When she mentions soup, I flash for a moment to a vision of fall, the leaves outside starting to burnish, a pot simmering on the stove that could feed us for days. Maybe we’d eat grilled cheese for dinner, or even French toast. I picture myself flipping each slice, drizzling on syrup.

Somewhere deep down, the pilot light is still on.

Easiest Week Ever: A Super-Flexible Meal Plan for Tired Cooks