成人快手

He finds the children’s story The Boy, the Mole, Fox, and the Horse “somewhat problematic”.

The picture book, about a boy, a fox, a horse and a mole who learn life lessons together, is typical of a wellness industry that can gloss over complex issues, he says. “There are individual little pages with various words of wisdom and aphorisms. A lot of what it says is very true. There's a line in there: ‘the bravest thing I ever said was help’. That's quite good, I like that. But I'm slightly uncomfortable with wellness literature as an industry. Life is hard. Life can be grizzly and uncomfortable. Problems that people have can be really gross. I think you need to, at some point, engage with that.”

He is becoming “increasingly spiritual”.

“I'm trying to nurture that part of me,” John says. “It’s testing your brain and finding out how you engage with your own thoughts and how you cope with your own feelings.” John recently tried a silent retreat, which gave him a new perspective. “The goal is to allow you to observe what you do when difficult thoughts or feelings come up. Because so much of what has got me into trouble in the past 30-odd years is trying to avoid difficult feelings and difficult thoughts.”

He first tasted alcohol when he was six years old.

For John, who has experienced alcohol addiction, it’s a significant memory. “I was at a friend of my mum's house, and I think I'd badgered them to give me a sip of wine or champagne. It was innocuous, but looking back now, I can sort of see it through a slightly different lens. I remember thinking, what am I gonna see? What's gonna happen? Will I get drunk? So even then, [alcohol] held quite a big space in my peripheral vision.”

A podcast helped him to get sober.

Years of struggling with his alcohol addiction led to the breakdown of his relationship. “Then it all sort of went out the window, and I was drinking every day,” he says. This cycle went on for another year, until John reached a turning point. “I listened to a podcast about sobriety. I just just typed into iTunes ‘sobriety’, and listened to the first thing that came up. I heard two people talking, and it was a completely new world to me. I'd been very scornful of the idea of not drinking in the past, and they just sounded so calm and so kind. I thought, oh, this is the place I need to be. So I went to a 12 step meeting the next day, and haven't had a drink since.”

He enjoys delving into painful subjects as a stand-up.

“I like the challenge of making it funny. It's so gratifying to be able to say something so dark, and to have a cast iron guarantee that in 10 seconds they are going to be pissing themselves. That's the best bit of my job, and I live for that. Why? I guess because it took a long time to learn how to do it, and it's hard – and it's nice to do stuff that's hard really well.”

He tries to view anxiety as an “alarm drill”.

“Someone said to me ‘nothing I've ever feared has actually existed’. I thought, oh, that's true! All of my fears and anxieties are scenarios my brain has invented to sort of prepare me. All your fears are invented by definition. Every single thing you've ever been afraid of does not exist.” That's not to say you shouldn't worry about things, he adds. “But once I'd understood that my brain was sounding an alarm that I could treat as a drill, it took a lot of power out of those fears and anxieties. And what I'm working on a lot at the minute is recognising the drills from the real alarms.”

You can listen to the full interview and more on 成人快手 Sounds.