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When the world feels unmanageable, baking offers something rare: control, comfort, and a tangible win—no perfect mindset required.

Home baking, once dismissed as a grandmother’s hobby, is having a moment. It’s become the anxiety era’s drug of choice for millions—especially women at midlife—buzzing with cortisol and drowning in responsibility. It’s something we can do without co-pays, permission, or therapists—an accessible way to reclaim control and self-soothe in a society that requires continuous emotional labor.

Baking’s not just a hobby; it’s a refuge.

The hashtag #baking has millions of posts, TV is awash in baking shows, and Cake Picnic, a baking meetup that started in 2024, is exploding with waitlists filled with those in search of a generous slice of comfort and connection.

I’ve been baking to make my stress levels fall like powdered sugar since long before social media existed. Now that everyone is doing it, there’s no shortage of baking videos to feed my love of binge scrolling when I want to chill. Yes, a good walk helps, but there’s nothing like the paddle attachment on my stand mixer to provide a fresh spin on what ails me.

Rolling Through the Chaos

Baking sits at the crossroads of the nostalgia economy and the anxiety economy. It’s a kind of comfort from the past—the aroma of childhood kitchens, the joy of family gatherings—merged with panic from the present. In a country where mental health services are often inaccessible or underfunded, we’re not simply baking to eat—we’re using it to self-soothe.

We’ve got aging parents, difficult workloads, and grown children who still need us. And although we’re praised for our resilience—for doing more with less—society says to be grateful, positive, and quiet. To patch ourselves up and carry on.

Baking offers a pocket of control: Dough yields, butter softens.

When I bake, I problem solve as I go. Dough too dry? Add water. Dough too wet? Add flour. The kitchen becomes the place where rules bend in our favor. Life becomes something we can shape and reshape over and over.

Sedative of Choice

Globally, new cases of anxiety disorders in women of childbearing age increased nearly 77 percent—from about 17.4 million in 1990 to nearly 31 million in 2022. Why? We’re the demographic held together by caffeine and a sense that we’re expected to be everyone’s emotional shoulder. One of mine has frozen in defiance—the other is threatening to. As my family members work through change, I find I need to keep teaching anxiety who’s boss.

But numbers alone don’t show what stress actually looks like. Men and women experience it differently: Men are more likely to show it outwardly, using a fight-or-flight coping response that can include playing sports—or watching them—as a form of distraction. Women are more likely to internalize it, giving stress room as we age to become the relative who won’t leave.

So why baking instead of therapy or rest?

The whole baking process—smoothing, mixing, perfecting—mirrors the emotional labor that many women perform for everyone but themselves. Our generation was raised to make it all better, all while pursuing careers, raising families, dealing with financial pressure, and overseeing everyone’s health issues. It’s an invisible load—work that men rarely take on.

Baking says, I hear you, I feel you. Let’s work it out. It’s a mental health system built with sugar, social content, and women tired of asking for help. We’re kneading like our lives depend on it.

The best part is that we can access the system without ever leaving home, changing out of our pajamas, or talking to a single soul. If baking were an actual doctor’s prescription, most of us would be more likely to comply.

A study at Pratt Institute found that anxiety and stress levels significantly decreased after baking. Turns out, punching down dough can release the beast in more than just the dough. I’m thinking grandmas of the past knew exactly what they were doing.

Is Baking Self-Care or Self-Distraction?

I do wonder exactly what everyone is doing with all these baked goods. I end up freezing the fruits of my labor or sharing them with friends and family. With the rise of GLP-1 drugs to help counter the desire to actually eat what’s baked, it’s hard to ignore the irony: Some women are baking cakes and cookies that they’re simultaneously medicating themselves not to eat. The same culture that sells us anxiety and sugar now sells injections to erase the evidence. Brands and influencers are paying attention, encouraging us to want to make cake, but not necessarily to eat it too.

Stress sells. Sugar sells. Skinny sells. Together they’re a trifecta.

Look, I know that baking isn’t going to cure anxiety, but the idea that millions of us are turning to it speaks to the difficult times we’re living in. We’re managing the same lists of people who need tending to—often with very little cultural support. Much of what we do for family may be for love, but duty still looms large. We long for certainty and comfort.

I know of a woman who has kept the same sourdough starter alive for 20 years. She even hires a babysitter to tend to it when she goes away. For her, that starter isn’t just dough—it’s continuity in an uncertain world. Having to begin again, to recreate it from scratch, would mean there’s no safety net, nothing to turn to that’s familiar and can provide the same desired result—the steady antidote to whatever ails her.

Baking represents more than food; it’s ritual and security.

But What Does It Mean?

Women are birthing sourdough starters, shaping loaves, and piping whipped cream, not to indulge, but to cope with a world we’re having trouble digesting. If therapy is the talk approach to our ills, maybe baking is the butter approach. It’s the chance to shape the illusion of order and stability—and maybe that’s the recipe we’re all craving right now.

Forget the mindfulness app—sometimes you just need something to punch, stir, slide into a warm oven, and pull out whole and edible.

What else in life works that way?

As for me, I’ll keep returning to the mixer to remember that we may feel like we’re falling down, but we can always rise up.

Creation, however small, is power.