Rest has become a dirty word - talking stress with Ruby Wax

I speak to actor, comedian, author and mental health campaigner Ruby Wax about the dreaded S word ahead of her live show Frazzled at Nottingham Playhouse on 1 May 2017. 

Our lives are ruled by stress and we are having to schedule in our relaxation. Even when we attempt to kick back and refuel, the stress of Monday’s impending to-do list takes over and relaxation becomes a fully-fledged operation in itself. If stress is supposed to be our friend, the cortisol booting us out the front door every morning, why does it feel like our enemy when we are trying to unwind?

Ruby Wax has been relentless in bringing the importance of discussing mental health to our attention. Now she is on tour, arriving at Nottingham Playhouse on 1 May, armed with her witty and accessible guide, to show us frazzled lot how to avoid burning out. She has also teamed up with M&S to help open a string of ‘Frazzled Cafes’ to host fortnightly talk-ins for people who want to exchange personal stories regarding stress and anxiety. 

Do we really need yet another self-help book teaching us how to relax? Wax tells me why mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, which she recently mastered in at Oxford University actually works and is truly for everyone. A state, rather than technique, she tells me MBCT is simply practising a different way of thinking.

Sceptical? Rest assured it is not sitting erect on a hillock, with legs crossed, humming a mantra that is probably the phonebook backwards. Her definition goes like this: “noticing your thoughts and feelings without kicking your ass while doing it”, which sounds like no sweat to me. 

“We’re supposed to be stressed, stress is what got me out of bed this morning. Now there is a new phenomena – we’re getting stressed about stress!” she exclaims. “We’re not just stressed, we’re thinking about stress. We’re problem solving creatures when it comes down to sending somebody to the moon, but when it comes to ‘why didn’t bob call me back?’, ‘why aren’t I funny enough?’ ‘why am I not thin enough?’, there is never answer. Everything around us is taunting us to say ‘well why aren’t you?’, [but] we can’t blame advertising or technology cause we put it there!” So is mindfulness the answer, I ask? “For me, it isn’t the answer for everybody. That has to be stressed. It's just that Oxford offers it and not witchcraft and so I thought ‘lets go with that one!”

The Oxford Centre for Mindfulness has discovered that MBCT prevents depression for people who have experienced three or more reoccurring episodes. The therapy resides the rate of depressive episodes over 12 months by 40-50% compared with usually care. Ruby wants to show people it is an exercise, as opposed to a method. “Just like you would go to the gym.” she asserts, “It’s brain fitness!”

Does mindfulness make that ‘critical inner voice’ disappear? “Well it doesn’t make it go away, it just means you have a different relationship with it.” she explains. “There’s an exercise where you take your focus to a physical part of the body, let's say breathing or hearing, and [when you] look at a brain scanner, the gabbling lowers down. You do get a stream of thought, we can’t go empty, but you have a way of pulling the focus away from the more critical thoughts.” 

So should you practise mindfulness even if you don’t feel ‘frazzled’? “If you’re completely in the present, when you want to be, because no one can do it all the time, but if you’re on holiday and you really notice where you are, you taste the coffee, and you see what’s in front of you, and you talk to the kids, and you’re not mind-wandering all the time, like most of us are, then don’t buy the book!” 

Wax’s guide is wickedly funny and dark humour and wit tend to assume a role in the discussion of serious issues throughout her work. “My hero is Bill Bryson and he writes about the history of the world, and space. If you make that funny, which he does, you get it. So to me, nothing is more interesting that the way your brain thinks and if you make that funny, enough that they’re laughing and getting information, that’s how we learn.

Working to a busy schedule, I wonder how much time she puts aside for mindfulness. “As I wrote in that book, you don’t have to do it sat on a gluten free cushion, I do it on the move. It’s just a different way of thinking.” she describes. “Not all day, just for a limited amount of time. You don’t go to the gym all day! So if I’m at the back of a bus, or I’m in a queue and I’m starting to lose my temper, I do it for one minute and you do see the results.”

What about practising mindfulness on the road, I ask? “I do it on the plane!” she answers. “You just do the exercises, and like running, it’s not just while you’re running, it stays with you, your heart changes, permanently.” 

If MBCT is as effective at reducing recurrence as antidepressants, can it be an alternative to medication? “I think if you’re mentally ill, you need medication. But you’re not always sick, so when you get a little better, and it loses it’s intensity, then you can go back to the gym.”

What if people started reaping the benefits of mindfulness sooner? Ruby tells me she is excited that schools are beginning to introduce it into their curriculum. “In the book I tell you how to teach it!” she says. 

The health psychologist Kelly McGonigal, who also works in the science help field, talks about how stress can be our friend. That we need to get better at stress rather than getting rid of it. “That’s completely true.” she agrees, “we need the stress but when you start to think about how stressed you are, how you’re not good enough, [how] you’re not fast enough, that’s when its dangerous.” 

In the book, Wax mentions her target to slow down, so will she be putting the breaks on after the tour? “No, I’m writing another book!” When? “Right now, during the tour, with a scientist! I’m also opening Frazzled Cafes which are in partnership with Marks & Spencer. They close their cafes for small groups who meet every two weeks and its a chance for everybody who wants to just talk honestly and meet their own community.” she says passionately. “You can write to frazzlecafes.org, and put your name on the list!”

This interview was originally published in The Nottingham Post in 2017.

Ruby Wax’s Frazzled Cafes continued online during the coronavirus pandemic offering virtual meetings. Her latest book How To Be Human is available to purchase from Waterstones here.