This was written in the wee hours of the morning, in the midst of insomnia, anxiety and a long way from home…

Taken on Brian Cox Universal Tour. Picture by Trent Burton

I only recently realised how much my life has been ruled by anxiety. I think it is one of the reasons Ricky Gervais delighted in me being his tour plaything, he could see the stress lines that covered me as he taunted.

It is one of the outcomes of writing my recent book, the one that propelled, after much debate, me into visiting a therapist. I am well aware that most people have far worse lives than me and to have ready access to a therapist is a luxury, so when I lay on her couch, I carry some middle class therapy guilt, too. I am not very good at it. Over the fifty minutes, I am frequently silent, fearful of being utterly dull, and aware that what I may imagine are my neuroses are secretly shared in the hidden selves of every other human being I have passed on the pavement to reach my appointment.

One of my main revelations has been how much of my existence, pretty much any of it that involves human contact, seeps with anxiety.

I had managed to pretend my anxiety was something else, whether irritable bowel syndrome or insomnia, but now I realise that those and all the other little paper cuts of living, are just anxiety in disguise. And looking at it close up, it was a shoddy disguise all along. After one therapy session where a black coffee had propelled more thoughts on the sofa than usual, the therapist said, “It sounds exhausting”, and it is and so unnecessary yet inescapable. Goddammit, I have a good life.

I have just started part three of a tour with Brian Cox. We stay in nice hotels and eat good food and play to audiences that are appreciative, but it would be too easy to sit back and relax. It would be impossible. It is 5AM in Hong Kong as I write this. I have had eight days of pretty full on insidious sleeplessness. I am writing this in the moment before dawn when any insomniac will know, you hit a deep despair. It is a very plush hotel to lie awake in, but I’d give it up for a decent night’s sleep in a Travelodge any day.

Picture by Trent Burton

I can play my games of pretending it is Lost in Translation, but that wears thin soon. It is such a bizarre thing to lose all ability to fall asleep. It is at this time of night that you start to worry that you will never sleep again and be insane then dead in a matter of days. I have tried all the tricks – beta blockers, melatonin, deep breathing, whale music – I have a mind that is dogged in its wish to fuck up my night and make me scared of the day. Without sleep, how will I be able to perform? Will I screw up the gig, forget my poem, burst into tears or just go mad. At this hour, I just want to be home, in my ned, with no commitments at all to think about, and without commitments that I can imagine going wrong, I can sleep. But I can’t sleep, not properly, not for a month or two yet.

The anxiety, whether fear of public incontinence or exhausted failure, is all about public shame and letting people down. I must NOT let people down, so my mind cooks up a trick to increase the hours I can imagine doing so. On the IBS anxiety front, this means each journey is worried about for days, weeks or months beforehand. In the words of Felicity Ward, “What if there’s no toilet?”

The moment a restroom is out of reach, my stomach and bladder pipe up, “Oops, we forgot to tell you, you need the loo right now.” On the plane, I look at all the options – if worse comes to worse, I could pop the blanket over my lap and use that near empty water bottle beside me. My mind is littered with crazed scenarios when trapped in toiletless lands.

This anxiety is the root of my anger. My temper, when it flares, and I hate that it does, is rooted to a fear of personal shame or a sense of personal failure or, sometimes, I fear that someone else is going to cause themselves personal shame and I don’t want them to experience that.

Picture by Steve Best

I think that enmeshed sense of anxiety and personal failure means that whenever you can rid yourself of one anxiety for a certain situation, a new one will be created to fit in that whole that could have been filled with delight. Once I am no longer fearing that I would forget what I was going to say and stay in fumbling silence in front of an audience, the fear became “A, but what if you wet yourself on stage” OR, “Imagine if you got an erection on stage in front of all these people who just wanted some jokes about wave particle duality and Pythagoras”.

In the desperation to control all possible permutations of a situation, the body still has things within and without, which the mind cannot control, so your anxiety can thrive in those parts of the flesh. The fact that none of those things have ever happened will not subdue the fear that this could be the night it does.

It’s nearly 6AM now. I am going to swear at the ceiling some more. Occupying my time by writing a post about anxiety while plagued with it seemed like something to do with the time.

Sorry I can’t offer any resolution. My resolve is to be “When all touring is finished at the end of next March, I will never leave the house or turn on the internet again”, and that should sort it.

All Robin’s live dates with Brian Cox can be found here. For dates and tickets of solo run at the Soho Theatre in July, November tour, Book Shambles at the Royal Albert Hall and Nine Lessons head here.

Robin Ince is a multi-award winning comedian, writer and broadcaster.  As well as spending decades as one the UK’s most respected stand-ups, Robin is perhaps best known for co-hosting The Infinite Monkey Cage radio show with Brian Cox.  For his work on projects like Cosmic Shambles he was made an Honorary Doctor of Science by Royal Holloway, University of London.

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