David Remnick: This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. If you're feeling a little stressed out lately, not that I'm implying anything stressful is going on, you might do what Ayelet Waldman did and take up a hobby.

Ayelet Waldman: It begins with a pattern or in the case of what's known as improv quilting, an idea, an emotion, or even just a whim. Today, I'm in the mood to make circles. Then there's the fabric. You choose it not only by color, but also how it feels in your hand. Should the fabric be slick or should it be nubbly?

David Remnick: Waldman is a novelist, an essayist, and earlier this year she wrote a piece for The New Yorker about quilting. Waldman discovered that quilting was not just pleasant or useful, but a way not to go out of your mind.

Ayelet Waldman: You sew two pieces together in a small block, and then small blocks together in larger blocks, each time returning to the iron to smooth the block and to the cutting table to--

David Remnick: She talked with producer Jeffrey Masters, and he's also a recent convert.

Jeffrey Masters: Now, going back to last year, can you explain what was going on when you began quilting and how that launched you into this?

Ayelet Waldman: It's such a strange-- I don't even really understand it myself entirely, although I worked hard to figure it out in the essay that I wrote for you guys. So, October 7th-- I was born in Israel, I have family there, but I've been a Palestinian peace activist for a really long time. On October 7th, I kind of lost my mind. As the news was coming in, I was getting more and more distraught, obviously, and I couldn't sleep. I was seeing the attack in my head and I was getting up. I was sleeping just a couple hours a night.

At some point, my older daughter and I-- My daughter's very crafty, so I had bought her some fabric and a little sewing machine. I was looking at the sewing machine that I had bought and I took my laptop over and I switched over to this video. I just googled "how to make a quilt" and I found this video of this middle-aged lady.

Jenny Doan: Hi, everybody. It's Jenny from the Missouri Star Quilt Company and I've got a really fun project for you today. Take a look at this quilt behind me. Gosh, doesn't this look like you worked hard?

Ayelet Waldman: From that moment, from literally that moment, every waking hour for months, I was quilting. I would get up in the morning, I would go to the sewing machine, I would quilt all day, and then I'd go to sleep. It wasn't like I was checking out. It was not that. I was still very much involved and invested in what was going on, but somehow, I could tolerate it while I was using my hands, and I decided I want to know how and why.

Jeffrey Masters: So you went to YouTube to learn how to do this.

Ayelet Waldman: Yeah.

Jeffrey Masters: That's where I started too when I made my first quilt.

Ayelet Waldman: Really? Well, what had made you do it?

Jeffrey Masters: Oh, I don't know. I don't have a good answer for you. I just felt this call, but I did relate to this concept you wrote about, which was, I'd never heard of, called piecing for cover, which I guess it just means you're making something for warmth to be used, not for display. That, I really related to because I wanted to make something useful. I'm kind of obsessed with this idea of the apocalypse and what will happen if we lose technology. I was like, "I make radio. I can't trust a podcast episode for food." And I mean this genuinely, something felt safe and familiar, that I now have this skill I can use if it all goes to hell.

Ayelet Waldman: I haven't thought of it that way, but I think that it is really part of it in this way. I mean, what I want to make is I want to make something that I can find comfort in. I don't make small quilts ever. I make quilts that I like-- I'll make a quilt you can cuddle up under on the couch, but mostly, I make quilts-- my first quilt was for a twin size bed, which is crazy. They're like, "Oh, do one that's like, you know, one panel." What about you? What was your first quilt?

Jeffrey Masters: Oh, it was way too big for a first quilt. It's five feet by seven feet.

Ayelet Waldman: Right? Exactly. You did the same thing.

Jeffrey Masters: Yeah, it just all goes back to wanting to make something useful. Tell me this, you said that when you first started quilting, you were doing it all day. Now, how many hours do you spend a day quilting?

Ayelet Waldman: Six?

Jeffrey Masters: Okay, what did you used to do with my time?

Ayelet Waldman: On a weekend-- Well, that's what I asked my husband. Oh, my God. This is the exact question. I said to Michael, "Dude, what did I do with my days before?" But I think, I swear to God, Jeffrey, I think I was just online. I think a lot of this time is time I didn't even realize I was spending on the internet. The reason I think I didn't even realize was because the physical act of wasting time for me is identical to the physical act of working.

If I get up from my laptop after spending the entire day on my laptop, I'm like, "Okay, well, that was working." Then if I really parse it out, how much of that time was actually working? Four hours, five hours max, or nothing, depending on my state of procrastination. Honestly, I feel like I was literally spending that time on the internet.

Jeffrey Masters: I think one of the things I like so much about your piece in The New Yorker, too, is that this is not just like one person's personal story about what they do to destress and get less anxious. You actually interviewed brain surgeons and neuroscientists that confirm that this is what the vast majority of people also can experience because of our brain makeup and chemistry.

Ayelet Waldman: Yeah, I mean, it's remarkable. I knew something had to be going on with my brain because I was feeling so different. I was managing stress. I think it was the first time that I was stressing out about something and my husband said to me, "Why don't you go quilt?" and I thought, "Huh, yes," and also, "What the heck is going on?"

Jeffrey Masters: Was that an immediate feeling in your brain, in your body?

Ayelet Waldman: Totally. I smell the fabric, I hear the machine, and I start touching the fabric, and I am like, everything that's going on in that agitation you feel when you're stressed, that kind of feeling in your throat, in your stomach, in the back, it just vanishes.

Jeffrey Masters: Wow.

Ayelet Waldman: It's so curious. Let me tell you a little bit about what I think is going on in your brain and what all of these various neurosurgeons have told me. Okay, so some of it has to do with this idea of bilateral brain activity. You know we have our right brain and our left brain. When we are engaged in bilateral stimulation, that actually makes us relaxed. It induces a kind of comfortable feeling. Quilting and some other hand work is a very bilateral activity because you're using both your hands. You're going back between things that are very technical and mathy and a kind of creative thing, and you're doing that sort of alternating back and forth.

Then there's this amazing thing called your default mode network. The default mode network is this brain system that is active when you're in the state of think about wakeful rest. You're letting your mind wander. It might be when you're on a walk, when you're not controlling what you're thinking about. That kind of wakeful rest when your default mode network switches on and takes over is very, very restful. When you go back to paying attention, you find yourself rested and invigorated.

Jeffrey Masters: That reminds me that in 2017, you wrote the book A Really Good Day about microdosing LSD as a way to help mood and anxiety disorders.

Ayelet Waldman: Right.

Jeffrey Masters: Does quilting have the same effect for you?

Ayelet Waldman: Totally.

Jeffrey Masters: That's crazy.

Ayelet Waldman: That's what's so interesting. The book that I wrote, the big discovery I made-- so A Really Good Day is about an experiment, microdosing with LSD. The big discovery I made doing all this research about psychedelics and the brain is that what psychedelics do is push your default-- this is obviously very simplified. They push your default mode network off the track. Having your default mode network veer off into a new in different direction can be really productive. To find out that this other thing that I'm doing is also inextricably linked to the default mode network is really fascinating and it's also not illegal. There's no crime involved in quilting.

David Remnick: You can read Ayelet Waldman's essay Piecing for Cover at newyorker.com. She spoke with Jeffrey Masters, a senior producer on our show.

Ayelet Waldman: You and I, we're taking this show on the road. We're going to go to QuiltCon, we're going to go to Missouri Star, you're going to turn The New Yorker Radio Hour into all quilting. The whole country is going to lose its mind. David, step aside.

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