Want to cure stress? Defrost the freezer!

Says PRUE LEITH as top authors share the mundane tasks that calm anxieties in these troubled times

WHEN seismic news events rock our lives, sometimes the way to deal with it is to switch off the conscious brain and do something practical. Psychologists call these ‘flow’ activities, such as baking or vacuuming, that can take us into a meditative state and stop us feeling so powerless. Here, five authors share their secret, and surprising, anxiety-busters . . .

Tidying Lego with my son is so soothing By NATASHA WALTER

LEGO, as many parents know, has a life of its own. Those little bricks creep inexorably over floors and tables, leaving pops of primary colours in every room.

Usually I just scoop them up as I move through the house and throw them into one big container.

But there I was for an entire afternoon, sorting the pieces with my seven-year-old son into categories that we kept sub-dividing: light grey and dark grey, big black and little black, white, blue, wheels...

There was a box for people — lots of little heads and legs — a box for accessories (mainly weapons), and a box my son named ‘the weird bits’, such as plastic flames from a Batmobile and plastic stretchers from an ambulance.

It’s the kind of activity that I usually avoid. In our house, reading, dancing, writing, playing music — you name it — tend to take precedence over obsessive tidying.

But this was a day on which I had woken up lost in a fog of anxiety created by our unbalanced political situation, and it was strangely calming to sit there talking with my son as we sorted piece after piece into separate boxes, and finally congratulated ourselves on our achievement as the last little brick fell into place.

Then we started to build again, and to scatter again.

Perhaps it is simply that when the bigger picture seems so chaotic, and the grown-ups have lost the plot, the only way to ground yourself is to spend a lot of time with children, doing something with small and definite patterns.

I feel pretty lucky that when the world outside gets too much, I can turn away from the chaos and listen to my son chatter as we bring order to the Lego world. A Quiet Life by Natasha Walter (Borough Press)

Oh the joy of a newly cleaned freezer By PRUE LEITH

I’m irritatingly organised: my clothes are colour-coded in the cupboard and I conduct ethnic cleansing in the garden: if primroses dare to come up pink in the red bed, I move them to the pink terrace.

So you’d think my freezer would be a treat to behold — all clearly labelled and dated. Sadly, No. Despite being a cook, mine’s a mess like everyone else’s.

Once I thawed redberry puree to mix with ice cream, only to discover it was beetroot (I used it all the same and it was delicious).

But this sloppiness has its upside. Having a go at the freezer is a surprisingly effective de-stresser. It’s amazing what sorting does for the mood. The deeper I get into the task the more carefree I feel.

I’m fiendishly organised about the process. First I spread an ancient picnic quilt on the floor. As I haul things out of the freezer they go into three piles.

On the quilt go things I want to keep. The other two piles are for ‘doing something with’ or for chucking out.

The quilt gets wrapped around the good stuff while I tackle the freezer. I know from grim experience that hacking off the ice is likely to end with a hole in the lining, so I put saucepans in the bottom of the chest, fill them with boiling water and close the lid.

While I decide if the 2-litre milk bottle contains milk or home-made elderflower cordial (they look identical when frozen), if I should keep something labelled ‘Curry??’, or if I’m ever going to do anything with a single pig’s trotter, I can hear the happy sound of ice cracking and falling to the freezer floor.

Oh the pleasure of wiping out the empty chest and re-filling it with room to spare.

Dealing with pile two is not so pleasurable. Seville oranges bought in January must now be made into marmalade. We must eat last year’s summer pudding just as I’m picking raspberries and strawberries for this year’s. I must make my ‘Everything From The Garden Chutney’, which should really be called ‘Everything from the freezer’ out of all last summer’s veg to make room for this year’s.

And I must dish up that ‘Curry??’ and boldly announce it as lamb, then explain to my grandchildren that I’ve thrown out their e-number lollies. These things are stressful.

But they are more than matched by the pleasure of feeding everything in pile three to my neighbour’s pigs; everything but the freezer-burned bacon, of course.

Prue Leith will be talking about her new novel the Prodigal Daughter at the henley Literary Festival on September 29. For tickets go to henleyliterary festival. co.uk or ring 01491 575948.

Weed next door’s garden to relax By LOUISA YOUNG

TImES of stress can, if you catch the stress at the right angle, be really good for getting things done. my garden has never been as tidy as when my fiance had cancer.

I couldn’t fix him but I could certainly fix the herbaceous border and bring order to the wisteria, as if I were a person with real power and influence over anything. But having made the garden good, then what?

Well, the old lady next door to me is always happy to have her front garden weeded, and I don’t even have to disturb her.

Then on the day of his cancer surgery, I decided to give blood. ‘Congratulations!’ said the nurse, ‘You’ve saved a life today.’ ‘Can I decide which one?’ I asked, and of course I couldn’t, but it didn’t matter. A life had perhaps been saved, and I felt good about it. Plus you get a biscuit along with your tiny dose of self-congratulation.

The only thing guaranteed to make me feel better in tricky times is to do something useful for someone else.

This self-awareness might not be the purest motive behind volunteering, but I doubt the people my volunteering helps care. There’s always a new mother who could do with a nap, and I like babies.

I volunteered at Crisis Christmas shelters for the homeless for some years, and found it such good fun I never thought about the halo-burnishing.

Last week, I signed up with a refugee charity to help with English lessons and mentoring. As a novelist I research into what people did through previous national and international crises, and I always find myself thinking: would I have been brave/strong/generous enough to do that?

I hope so. Refugees from Nazi Germany grew up to be doctors, teachers and Nobel Prize-winners. But even just for myself, I find putting even a little bit of effort into improving something for someone else does have a grand effect on dispelling my own fears.

It seems to me a little miracle that I can be selfish and helpful simultaneously. Devotion by Louisa Young (Borough Press)

Making mosaics is good for the soul By MARION McGILVARY

mY whole life is something of a self-soothing activity — the three Bs; bed, bath and books, see me through everyday stresses. Throw in cuddling a cat, and it’s a maintenance dose of Valium. However, in these

turbulent times when it seems like the whole world is having a nervous breakdown, I am increasingly reaching for the big guns — a box of smashed china and a pot of tile adhesive. I make mosaics.

I started on a whim about two years ago and joined a class given by Catherine Parkinson, a mosaic artist working in London.

Frankly, I couldn’t really see the appeal — all that fiddling about with teeny bits of glass and marble, like bricklaying a doll’s house, or colouring in with tile instead of felt-tip pens.

But from the moment I entered her studio, I was hooked.

When I cut my first tile, time ceased to have any meaning to me, except as an anxious look at the clock at the end of an evening, feeling disbelief that I’d lost three hours.

I’ve always drawn and painted. I’ve been a bookbinder and decorated furniture — all of these pastimes have given me that all important sense of ‘flow’.

That feeling when time stands still and your hands are busy creating. Your mind goes to a different place where you are both thinking about nothing, and everything at the same time, with ideas just materialising from a sort of meditative state.

But nothing has engrossed me, calmed me, excited me like making mosaics. I’m not very good, but that doesn’t affect the satisfaction it brings.

It’s actually the most restorative thing I’ve ever done, in all senses, both practical and emotional.

I work almost exclusively with broken china — the sort of oldfashioned cups and saucers you see cracked on a market stall and wonder who is ever going to buy them. Well that would be me. That trash is my treasure. Trawling junk shops and stalls, loading up on cracked plates, is my second favourite thing to do after eating chocolate.

Friends save up their crockery accidents, and yes — I am the person who eyes up your jolly nice Spanish dinner plates and wonders if I could accidentally, maybe, just drop it, so I could have the pieces.

I lust after other people’s china like a vulture circling a limping lion. Because that’s the real beauty of it. Out of broken, often muchloved, items comes something new, so that there is never any real loss when you smash a treasured bowl — because it can be reborn in a mosaic.

It’s a great metaphor for life: out of ruin comes transformation. OK, the Meissen gravy boat now reassembled around a plant pot may not count as art, but it’s extremely good for the soul. A Lost Wife’s Tale by Marion McGilvary (Penguin)

There’s nothing like a freshly polished car By WILLIAM LEITH

WheN you get stressed, there are two things you can do.

One is to face up to what’s causing the stress, and attack it head-on. But it’s not always possible. You can’t attack the political situation, or the weak pound. And sometimes, like me, you can’t attack the final chapter of the book you’re writing, because that perfect ending is so frustratingly elusive.

The other thing you can do while stressing is to attack something else instead. Could you not, for instance, clean your house? Could you not attack that mess?

Absolutely not. To think about cleaning the house would cause stress. It would open a Pandora’s box. But there is something much simpler. I clean my car. I start with the inside, and soon my stress begins to lift. I’m like an archaeologist, picking through the traces of the past weeks of motoring.

A cardboard coffee cup brings a pang of nostalgia. There’s a brown paper bag with something inside I daren’t look at. On the floor, and in the door trays, I count five varieties of nut: peanuts, cashews, brazils, almonds.

In the footwells are plastic and glass bottles. There are things I thought I’d lost: a book, a pair of glasses. Shoes and supermarket receipts. A world of ordinary things. My stress is dissipating.

Next, I drive to the car wash at the supermarket. They know me there. There’s a little Portakabin and four or five smiling guys. I usually go for the cheap option: for £8 they’ll hose the car down with warm water and detergent.

I’d like to watch, but the etiquette is to go away for 20 minutes. Long enough for a calming walk. This can be when the stress falls away completely — 20 minutes, absolutely no decisions to make. When I get back, the car looks almost new. All filth gone.

I’m filled with a sense of accomplishment. And before I drive back to the things stressing me, I take it all in — the shine of the paintwork, the pin-sharp windscreen, the wonderfully glossy, buffed tyres.

And for one brief moment, in this supermarket car park, opening my wallet, I feel as if something about my life, at the very least, is perfect.