Staying Sane, No Matter What

Feb 6, 2025

Discover the unique concept of 'sanity quilting' as a way to craft a life you love amidst chaos. Explore practical tips for maintaining mental wellness, from the importance of disconnecting from technology to recognizing the fine line between enthusiasm and mania. Dive into strategies for curating joyful experiences while emphasizing creativity and community support. Learn how stillness and meditation can foster tranquility as you create your own vibrant, personalized quilt of life.

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ADVICE

Sanity Quilting

Build a life you love, even within societal boundaries, by focusing on what truly matters to you.
Start with something you're passionate about and gradually build your life around it, like creating a "sanity quilt".

ADVICE

Finding Peace in Chaos

When everything around you feels chaotic, create a "sanity quilt" by focusing on activities, relationships, or rituals that bring you peace.
Find your center and prioritize inner peace to combat external chaos.

ADVICE

Creating Calm Amidst Chaos

Prioritize calm and peace, especially for mothers with young children, by finding moments for yourself.
Even amidst chaos, find small pockets of time to reconnect with yourself and find peace.

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When I was writing Beyond Anxiety, I wanted to find a good metaphor for building a life that you love within the cultural bounds of wherever you are and still stay sane. And I thought about crazy quilting!

If you are a quilter, you know that crazy quilting is not the same as ordinary quilting. Ordinary quilting starts with a pattern that is carefully drawn out, and then the quilter sews together panels that follow that pattern. With crazy quilting, you start with a scrap of fabric you love, and you sew another piece to it and then another and another, around and around in a spiral, until there’s a large enough piece of cloth that you can call a quilt.

And I was thinking: That’s sort of how you can make a life, too.

In this episode of The Gathering Room, I’m talking about what I call “sanity quilting” and offering up some practical advice for maintaining your mental well-being during turbulent times.

Like crazy quilting, sanity quilting involves building a life out of the things you love in order to stay peaceful, calm, inspired, and sane.

In the quilt that is your time—your whole life—most of us are taught to follow the patterns set by our culture: Get a job, get a relationship, have a family, buy a house, etc.

However, for me, it’s always been much more interesting to say, “What do I love most?” and put that at the center of my quilt. Then I put things that connect with it around the edges until I gradually fill up my time with things that I love. That’s the way I’ve lived my life.

The culture might view this as “crazy,” but I don’t think it’s not crazy to do what you love. What’s crazy is pushing what you love to the margins of your life—or even worse, never experiencing them at all.

Whenever the pattern of society that we thought we knew is being disrupted, it feels very confronting to a lot of people. At the times when everything around you feels like it’s going crazy, that’s when you must make a sanity quilt. And you do that in very quiet ways.

Join me for the full episode to learn more about stitching the things you love into your life, so you can cultivate peace, sanity, and calm during even the most challenging times.

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