How Ruby Wax aims to change the way we think about our brain

Ruby Wax is on a crusade to change the way we think about our brain.

“We don’t have to be crushed by this c**p going on,” she says, “and to whine about it isn’t going to make it go away.”

In her latest tour, Sane New World, which will visit Worthing this month, the comedian will put some of her training as a therapist into practice, and teach her audience about the workings of the mind.

Ruby was brought up in Illinois, and her parents were Austrian Jews who fled to America to escape the Nazis. She moved to the UK and gained a place at the prestigious stage school Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, but soon realised that she preferred comedy to classical acting.

Her glittering CV includes writing and editing the script for Absolutely Fabulous, acting with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and writing and performing in her own shows for the BBC and Channel 4. However, she now focuses her time campaigning for greater mental health awareness and promoting a better understanding of the brain.

Sane New World is based on her book of the same name, and looks at the workings of the mind, as well as the meditation practice mindfulness, which she likens to “cognitive dope – it feels good”.

When the book was released, Sane New World received excellent reviews from critics and celebrities alike.

Fellow comedian and actor Stephen Fry wrote: “Ruby Wax has an extraordinary mind, and she has brought it to bear with trademark wit and searing honesty on the subject of that mind, and the minds of all of us.”

More tellingly, the book has also received praise from psychiatrists and psychologists.

Professor Peter Fonagy, OBE, of University College London, said: “Ruby Wax combats ignorance with knowledge, confusion with crystal clarity, prejudice with open-mindedness, rigidity with humour and slays the dragon of stigma in this superb introduction to the 21st-century science of the mind. This book will be a turning point in our battle to bring parity of esteem to mental and physical health.”

Her new show was built out of this; part comedy, part lecture. She sums it up: “What I did was I took how your mind works and I made it funny – except it’s all true... It is your brain, it is science, it’s me, it’s comedy, it’s Ab Fab-ish. It’s all that.”

She also explores self-criticism, and how to deal with it.

She explains, “I’m telling you how you think, and why you have those voices that go ‘you’re not good enough, too fat, you’re whatever’.”

It’s something that everyone experiences, she says, adding: “Give me someone who doesn’t have that.”

Once, this served a purpose, she explains. “We did need it. We had to be vigilant if something was going to kill us. But when that threat was lost, it came out as ‘I’m not good enough’ instead.”

In the publicity for her show, she says: “We are not equipped for this century”.

Is this what she means? “Yes, in a way; all of this stuff really worked for us but now it doesn’t work so well.

“But also, technologically we’re at the top of our game right now and we have to adapt to this.”

Ruby was initially attracted to mindfulness because “it had the best evidence and science behind what happens in your mind”. But practising it for several years has shown her just what an effect it can have.

She tells Simply Worthing: “It is learning to exercise your brain like you would your body.”

Modern mindfulness was developed in the 1970s and is based around taking time to be aware of your thoughts and surroundings without letting them overwhelm you. It typically involves breathing exercises and focusing on specific senses.

It encouraged her to study for a Masters degree from Oxford in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. Learning about the workings of her mind was therapeutic in its own way.

She says: “When you have an imagining of how you work, it becomes kind of humorous, and it’s not so daunting. And I can see how other people work too. It is like understanding how your car works.”

She was the only one on her course to present part of her final dissertation in a show, a move she says made sense.

“I was always going to be an entertainer,” she says. “If you can make the brain entertaining, why wouldn’t that benefit people?”

And indeed, it does benefit people. The second half of Sane New World hands the microphone to the audience, and Ruby says she feels she gets a good reaction.

She says: “I have started to realise that we are all pretty similar. I have had a pretty good impact on the audience. It was an experiment and it happens to work.”

Ruby was featured on a Comic Relief poster about mental illness, which stated: “One in five people have dandruff. One in four have mental health problems. I’ve had both.”

It was plastered all over the London Underground, making her quite literally the poster girl for mental illness.

Initially, the spotlight on a previously private part of her life was quite overwhelming.

“Well, I felt terrible!” she said. “But then I wrote a show, and pretended that was my publicity.”

The resulting tour, Losing It, explored depression with refreshing frankness, and as well as theatres she performed it in hospitals and mental health clinics.

The stigma and silence surrounding mental illness that characterises discussion of mental illness is a problem in comedy too, Ruby says.

“No one ever talks about this stuff. Comedians don’t have more or less mental illness than anyone else – it’s still the one in four. It is not something we ever discuss.”

Losing It challenged this, she explains.

“We discuss dating and relationships; I just happened to expand it a little bit.

“You create a new market, but at least it’s a niche! I’m trying to make comedy a little smarter.”

Ruby recently announced a new book, which will be titled Wake the F**k Up: A Mindfulness Guide for the Frazzled. It will be more practical than Sane New World, and include “How to do it for teenagers and businesses and mothers and other people – but funny”.

n Ruby Wax appears at the Pavilion Theatre, Marine Parade, Worthing, at 8pm on Friday May 22. For tickets priced £19 (concs £2 off), phone 01903 206206 or visit worthingtheatres.co.uk.