The Zen of Noodles and the Art of Self- Care

“Self-care”: a 21st century term, our language has now idiomatically appropriated the very real need to take time for oneself and recharge and repair. Even our burgeoning national fleet of electric vehicles must be switched off and allowed a plugged-in boost. As opposed to self-soothing habits – that night in with technology switched off and just you, the dog, a blanket and a book; or an evening hot bath run with candles round its edge and music for the soul on the speakers (if that’s your thing) – self-care is, by contrast, about actively doing what betters our life, reducing stress on a practical basis.

The Harvard Health blog has written before on nutritional psychiatry. In basic terms exploring the concept of the human brain on food, you probably haven’t realised before that your brain needs to be constantly fuelled, even while asleep. Obviously, we can’t be actively eating while snoozing, and that’s why we have the digestive system and other bodily processes that we do. However, as in other areas of health, what we eat matters. For example, lots of refined sugar will harm the brain. Indeed, although you might get a momentary high from chowing down on a delectably gooey brownie (particularly in the first of those given self-soothing scenarios above), multiple studies have shown that too much refined sugar can exacerbate depression and other psychological disorders. It also negatively impacts insulin regulation overall and leads to inflammation and oxidative stress: precisely the opposite of what is needed.

It is now widely accepted that food plays far more important and central a role in our lives than simply keeping us alive. Matters of nutrition aside, food features in religious ceremony, cultural customs, and is a prominent part of countries’ economies. The history of noodle making is – well – also tangled up in such a way, and it is a great method by which to meditatively muddle through one’s thoughts: as the dough is crafted into the best and final version of itself (i.e. noodles), so too our mind sculpts our mental mutterings and musings constructively. While, as Najmieh Batmanglij wrote for The Smithsonian, a noodle master in the northern lands of China might well be able to magically “stretch and swing a lump of dough into perfect individual strands in 15 minutes” – likelihood is our own humble endeavours will manage merely palatably digestible portions, but you see our meaning…

The earliest mention of noodles dates back to the 5th century, in the Jerusalem Talmud, culinary food historians tending to agree that noodle-type pasta probably came from Iran (sorry, Italy). When flour was first introduced to Japan by Zen priests travelling back from China during the Middle Ages (from the close of the 12th century to the end of the 16thcentury), noodles quickly became popular in mainstream Japanese society. Though some records state this exchange between the two countries occurred much earlier (in the 9th century, contemporary to when hard durum wheat was introduced to Italy from Persia), noodles soon became a competitor staple to rice, even in the monasteries, where the tradition of rice gruel for breakfast and steamed rice for lunch expanded to include simple noodle dishes being offered to visitors. By the 14th century, noodles had reached Korea as well.

The flour of these noodles was often wheat, but traditional Chinese noodles are thought to have been crafted from millet (one 4,000-year-old bowl of the stuff was discovered intact at an archaeological site in the northern part of the country at the start of the Millennium). Today, noodles can be made from rice, buckwheat, mung beans, kelp, corn, konjac (a type of yam), and so on. In China, birthdays are celebrated with “longevity noodles”, while for marriages and moving into a new home noodles are taken with gravy to symbolise a flavoured life. If you fry noodles, you make them Yang; if you boil them, they become Yin.

Originally mentioned in the I Ching (“Book of Changes”) in approximately 700BC, Yin represents the female nature; Yin is passive, the negative principle of nature (not a feminist system, then…). Yin is also connected with the moon and the cold and the damp. Conversely, Yang represents the male nature; Yang is active, the positive principle of nature (not that every man seems to follow such, but…). Yang also represents wind, heat, and the dryness of summer. The point is that these binary opposites are ever in a fluid state of balance and constant change: such is life. This is the Zen of noodle making. The metamorphosis from separate ingredients to lump of dough to something carefully tended to and become really quite beautiful is a metaphor for how we handle life in general: noodle making becomes a metaphor for self-care and deeper meditative practice.

Few people are unlikely to have failed to attempt to make pasta from scratch, particularly during the lockdowns. Some of us also tried our hand at noodle craft. Nutritional psychiatry-wise, noodles become that bit denser and more nutritionally complete when eggs are added to the dough, the amino acid composition of the ova rich in protein and the fat content (between 10% and 15%) easily digestible and brain-healthy. Egg noodles offer the additional benefit of B vitamins and vitamins A, D, E, and even K and C in small amounts, too. Or one can always top a bowl of purely carbohydrate-dense noodles with an egg, as well.

If you find yourself horrified by the thought of all those (delicious) carbohydrates, though, then perhaps take a step back and re-evaluate. The sense in such a carbohydrate rich diet is historically sound, it seems. Dr John McDougall, a plant-based physician, has for years been expounding the benefits of a “starchitarian” diet. For those scratching their heads at the term, “starchivores” predominantly eat rice, corn, potatoes, and fruit and vegetables. Having seen first-hand the effects of a westernised diet on subsequent generations of the same East Asian families, Dr McDougall noted how, from the first generation’s rice-and-vegetable diet to the second generation’s turning to fast food culture, by the third generation obesity had become a prevalent condition.

Flying in the face of recent preoccupation with protein, the physician asserts humans only need 5% protein per day. Basing his science on first-hand studies and historical record of starchbased diets being commonplace until nations become rich, Dr McDougall calls such chronic conditions as obesity, Type-II diabetes, coronary heart disease, high cholesterol, and the rest – i.e. the by-and-large diet-caused diseases – a mass “food poisoning”. Or, to use his expression, “people are sick from eating the king’s food” (aka meat and dairy). A starch-based diet, by contrast, costs nothing and (unless one is suffering from a gluten intolerance or similar such gastrointestinal disorder) has no side effects. Further, all is not lost: disease can be reversed by a return to starch-based eating habits. The expression “the breadbasket of the world” wasn’t coined for no reason.

Self-care, then, is finding one’s equilibrium again; discovering the perfect balance of mind, body, and soul. Self-care can be developing a thicker skin and becoming more resilient, encompassing a rewiring of our normal thought processes in order to endure and prosper. In this manner, we maintain an inner calm, we exude a confidence, and we become more effective in multiple parts of our life. All thanks to noodles? Who’s to say…

THE SILENT SOLOTASKING SELF

A NATURAL RESET

From forest bathing to quietly revelling in the gentle lullaby lap of lake waters on a pebbled shore, simply sitting in or strolling through the natural world switches off our multitasking machine-like ways and presses reset. We become conscious of our breath, aware of the noise we add to the space around us, and senses sharpen as we learn to listen and once more simply be – honestly and without haste.

It isn’t surprising: humans weren’t born to sit in clinicalseeming offices under poor quality lighting without fresh air, chained to desks until the clock’s release. Nonetheless, if the pandemic had a positive side, it was a semi-reprieve from such a scenario. Now, hybrid working lingers in many sectors and, on the whole, the workforce is much happier with the weekly schedule: too many WFH hours and one feels as if one lives at work (which, to be fair, you do when you’re fully remote); whereas, too many in-office days and you feel as if you slot in eating and sleeping as your downtime, the commute stealing away all other remaining 60-minute openings. In both scenarios, oftentimes we know we’ve been staring into the virtual world too long, inputting and outputting, when that familiar craving for greenery and birdsong calls, siren-like, and we can’t sit still, can’t concentrate any longer: we must, we simply must, be outside.

In an age that has become necessarily environmentally aware, it is intriguing that “Nature therapy” is an actual thing being prescribed more frequently these days by psychologists. Multiple studies have found that being in nature can improve cognitive function and lower blood pressure, as well as support the immune system and aid stress management and our ability to sleep soundly. Even pottering in the garden counts as being at one with Mother Earth. The key is remaining present, fully embracing the moment in those surroundings; being still and steady both in mind and in breath.

The Tang Dynasty poet, Wang Wei is known as “the Buddha of the Poets”. His poetry focussed almost entirely on Nature, a central idea within that poetic philosophy – most expressive of the Chan school of thought – is that of emptiness. He believed that the self is empty, formed by energies external to it, and that it also contains “the perceptible world in its totality”. By such thinking, “all phenomena that take place in reality – from flowing water and sunlight to the twittering of birds – are empty”. How on Earth does a poet express this? In silence, in absence of language, of course. For it is only in silencing the self that we can hear the truth we seek.

An iota of this concept can be carried with us when we are back at our desks, refreshed from our natural sojourning, and find ourselves habitually on the precipice of leaping into the maelstrom of multitasking madness in order to meet deadlines that seem to advance never one by one, but all at once, an army of asks. Indeed, multitasking is actually bad for the memory and for productivity, according to Dr David Merrill, adult and geriatric psychiatrist at the Pacific Neuroscience Institute’s Pacific Brain Health Centre. Dr Merrill asserts that our brains were not designed to do two things at once. If we do attempt to do so, there is what the APA (American Psychological Association) calls a “dual-task cost” whereby we become less accurate and slower at each thing that is juggled. That said, there are the blessed few among us who are “supertaskers”: a 2010 study published in the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review found only 2.5% of participants could remember words and answer basic maths questions whilst in a driving simulator. Supertaskers, indeed.

So, what is the alternative? Well, it’s pretty simple really: solotasking. The Metro reported on solotasking earlier in the year. Intentional managers of time, solotaskers refuse to be distracted from the, um, task at hand: their mantra is “one thing at a time” and everything else is to be excluded until completion. What solotasking permits is a “flow state”, that strangely euphoric feeling of being in control and satisfied by what we are doing. A sense of accomplishment overcomes us when we are in the present with a project, rather than ever chasing our tails as we try to focus on too much at once. Indeed, full immersion in the work means a speedier turnaround time and work of a better quality (not the one for the office natter sesh, then).

How to switch from being a multitasker to becoming a solotasker? Do we need to channel Eastern wisdom and shift our workspaces, not to the garden shed, but to the great outdoors completely? No; let’s keep it real, folks. Instead, try the old school methods of making a ToDo list, of blocking off limited periods of time for specific tasks, switching off mobile notifications and refusing to be distracted. Identify what time of day you work best as well, as you need to protect those “power hours” for your deepest concentration efforts. Good luck.