How to laugh when you’ve been to hell and back

0:00Hello and welcome to Happy Place with me Fern Cotton. Today how to laugh when you've been to Helen back. My family are absolutely hilarious. The way we go about life, we don't take things too, too seriously. And I think that's what I've instilled in my life, that don't take life too seriously because, you know, we're all going to be dead one day. So I thought, right, mashed potato and porridge oats, I'll have that the night before and then I'll be OK and I'll be full of glycogen ready to run the marathon. but Audrey didn't digest the porridge and the mashed potato and decided to chuck it out my body at three in the morning.

0:42And I used alcohol as a coping mechanism, right? And it would be dead easy for us to be like, oh, but I don't recognise that girl now. Like, I drink green juice and I do 5am yoga and I give birth to an avocado. There's a reason for the cliched line, if you don't laugh, you'll cry. Those heightened emotions can actually be so close together. It's like when a toddler falls over and you have those few seconds where everyone holds their breath waiting to see if they're going to whack out the tears or a giggle. I think not taking life too seriously can be a brilliant coping mechanism in otherwise anxious times.

1:21Sometimes I can take life way, way too seriously and I can get just really in a funk because I can't see the humour and that is something that I need constant reminding about. Laughing is just such a brilliant perspective shifter. The rubbish thing has happened regardless. It's up to you to then choose how to react to the situation. So today loads of brilliant examples of just that. The crossroads where people have decided to see the funny side of a situation or of themselves. Fat Timbo explains how humour has helped her family. Adele Roberts tells the absurd story of what happened to her and her stoma the night before running the London Marathon.

2:10Dawn French chats about owning the moments you were a bit of a twat. And Vicky Patterson, live from the Happy Place Festival, explains why it's so important not to shame our past selves. We can have a laugh with them along the way instead. I hope you'll find what they have to say really useful for your own life. But if not, you'll have a bloody good laugh along the way. On that note, stick around till the end because there's some behind the scenes off air stuff that will have you creasing up.

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4:20Right, let's do it. Here's the show.

4:43Humour seems to be a really important theme throughout your whole life and also your upbringing with how your parents or your whole family really deal with life and deal with the unexpected and situations that come up. Would you say that's true? That is definitely true. Obviously, it starts from my family. My family are absolutely hilarious. The way we go about life, we don't take things too, too seriously. And I think that's what I've instilled in my life, that don't take life too seriously because, you know, we're all going to be dead one day. Yeah, let's just cut to the chase. We're all going to die.

5:25Yeah, we're all going to die. So why I take things so, so seriously. So in terms of like, there was one story that I mentioned in my book. Tenerife. Tenerife. Don't. I had a panic attack reading that. I was like, how are you guys reacting this? Please tell this story. So when we went to Tenerife, it was very eventful. We had so much fun. It was great. When it was time to go home, we went to the airport and we lined up as you do, you know, get your boarding passes. they said to us your flight was yesterday I don't sorry but you guys just all laughed we all just no at first it was shocking yes but it was just if you don't laugh you'll cry but I would go straight to cry I would forget the laugh bit this is the problem I would be so that's my worst nightmare I would be so panicked I'd feel out of control and you guys were all like on a roll of laughter where one stopped and then someone else would laugh.

6:27It was such a funny day because my dad's panicking. It's just the way my dad's reacting and laughing. He's like, what's this? How did we? Oh my, who did this? And then finding someone to blame. Me and my brother just laughing. We're like, what the hell? Well, we ended up back in London. There was a flight on that same day, so it was fine. It was super expensive, yes, but we made it. So it's what it is. But I think having that in the back of your mind when you can to not take life seriously is an amazing coping mechanism in the everyday stuff, but also in the more poignant or challenging moments of life to go, just don't take yourself so seriously.

7:07And I think reading your book, that really hit home. If I can feel myself getting a bit serious and judging myself a bit or overly worrying, humour is such a great perspective shifter really, isn't it? Because it's not going to actually change the situation, but it switches your perception of something. It definitely does. I think for me, humour is so important to have that because it brightens up your day. When you're feeling low and feeling down or, you know, you're overthinking, when you laugh, you forget, you know, you feel good about yourself or you feel good about a certain situation. And I think it's so important to just have that in your life instead of always being so serious.

7:49and may we add on top of that the night from hell that you had before the London marathon oh god yeah I'm like which which night because Audrey's so naughty I was reading this book and I felt sick for you because I am obsessed with sleep because it's not guaranteed with me so I get really pernickety about if even if I've got a podcast I won't go out and do anything in the evening before because it might disrupt and that's too much I know I've got to address the balance I'm a work in progress. I'm very happy to say that. I've not mastered any of this stuff, but I don't trust myself. If I go out, if I get back, I'm overstimulated and then I start thinking about things.

8:26I won't sleep. It might mess up the podcast. I don't want to do that. So I'm really like nerdy about my routine and sleep and yada, yada. I can't imagine things going so tits up the night before a marathon and you still managing to do what you did. Tell us about this awful night. I was shaking reading this. Because you want the perfect night's sleep before a marathon. Without a doubt. That's all you want. You just want to sleep for eight hours. It's not a massive ask. Oh, mate. So the night before, it's a rookie error really for me, but it's because I was making it up as I was going along. There's not many people that have run a marathon with a stoma, so I didn't know what to eat.

9:05So I decided to eat mashed potato and porridge the night before. And is that normally okay with your stoma? Like what? Yeah, yeah. It's palatable with a stoma. So it's easy, digestible foods. Really, if Audrey had her way, I'd be in sausage rolls, anything beige, like any processed food is really good because it's already been broken down by industry. And you just almost like put it in your body and it melts away and it goes in. Whereas I can't really have like veg and fiber anymore. Anything with like a skin on, I can't break it down because that gets done in the large colon, which I can't use at the moment.

9:39So it's almost like I have to have like just really easy to eat food. So I thought, right, mashed potato and porridge oats. I'll have that the night before and then I'll be okay. And I'll be full of like glycogen ready to run the marathon. But Audrey didn't digest the porridge and the mashed potato and decided to chuck it out my body at three in the morning.

10:02I'm deep breathing. I'm deep breathing about this one. So you feel the tingle. I get woken up all the time by the tingles of Audrey. So I'm like, is she still in her bag or is she going wild? as she managed to break the seal on the bag because what what your stoma can do is stoma bags aren't an exact science and they're still being worked on so they stick to your body with like this sticker and if you have a naughty stoma sometimes they can get the sticker off and just escape and then it's basically like having an open tap on the front of your body it just comes out and you can't control it um and yeah so i'm like the exorcist spewing like porridge and mashed potato in a fancy hotel so I like jumped out of bed ran into the shower it's doing its thing spraying it all over the shower but then my my pajamas are ruined and then it got stuck in the shower so then I had to like the shower started flooding because it wouldn't go down the the plug hole so because it was fancy it was like one of those flushed the floor showers oh you want a shit shower in this situation not a fancy one and then it all comes out from like the shower door and it just like floods the actual bathroom.

11:10So I'm there with no clothes on, cleaning a posh hotel bathroom of like porridge oats and mashed potato at three in the morning. And Audrey's just like, And then you can't get back to sleep. Yeah. Yeah. So then I'm lying there thinking, God, it's three in the morning. I need to be up at six. What am I going to do? And that, like you say, that anxiety just keeps you awake then. So I tried to go to sleep, but I just pretty much lay there like that. it's horrendous yeah but this is again a really important life lesson for any of us on just a regular day to not write off the success of a day because you haven't slept and I used to do this all the time I'd go oh well today's absolutely screwed because I didn't sleep and it's all going to go to shit and I'd be so dramatic and actually I'd get to the end of the day and go well that was all right yeah there's no drama I did the job and everything was fine and I'm a little bit more tired than I'd be normally but it's fine you not only managed to get over that you know the would be drama you managed to run a marathon in three hours 30.

12:13Now you're saying it I'm like how did that happen but it did it did.

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13:10And you can choose between 10 varieties, each variety available in either three or six milligrams. Check out zen.com slash find to find Zen at a store near you. Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. You're invited It's a spending evening on Fremont Avenue. For generations, this house has been home to soulful music, good food, and cutthroat card games. Saints and sinners. Unexpected laughs and unspoken truths. Good times. Hard times. And, of course, family. Always family. So pull up a chair and join us at Fremont Avenue. A world premiere play only at Arena Stage.

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14:32It is. But don't forget the fun. Oh, it's so fun. That's the only thing that I can, that is a constant in my life, is that of every difficult thing, and certainly every mistake, there's the flip side of it, where you go, I can't believe this is who I was in that particular occasion. I can't believe I had a crush on this person and said those things. The story that made me laugh out loud, and then I had to go and read it to my husband, was when you went to the panto with Jennifer and you weren't in on the joke that everybody else knew. Do you want me to tell the story? So I went to a panto and we went to see a friend of ours.

15:16We were, I don't know, we'd only just started, we must have been about 23, 24. and we were sitting in the middle of a row, and our lovely friend Gareth was singing, and he was a prince charming, it was marvellous. And the buttons came on and announced that there was going to be a prize for whoever had the winning magic number on the back of their programme, and I've never won a prize, and that mitigates my story a bit. I've never won a prize. And what's more, he then held up the prize, which was a giant troll, those kind of trolls that you stick on top of a pencil. Loved a troll. I collected those in all colours of hair.

15:49that this was giant. I mean, I really wanted it. Wanted it more than any 23-year-old should. But really wanted it. So very interested in that. Buttons comes on. He puts his hand in the bucket to take out the random winning number. And he announced that the number was number 13. And I was, I had number 13. I could not believe it. Finally, finally, I had won something. So I just pushed everybody else out of the way in my row. I can see it now. you know scraping my knees past her get out of the way I'm the winner I'm the winner getting out into the aisle and even Jennifer trying to pull me back and I just thought she wants it she's not having it so I just went I got to the aisle and I started a little victory trot all the way down to the front and there was this kind of noise going on all around me and I mistook that noise for a kind of them goading me on like a day you know celebrating the champion and I got to the stage got all the way to the stage so I'd come from the back of the theatre down to the front and he whispers whispering something to me and I was going, what, what?

16:52Why do I can't hear you? Just give us the troll of all this laughing that was going on. That should have been the first red flag. And he said to me, everyone's got number 13. It's a joke. And I was the only person in the whole theatre that had not got the joke. And there were people who had dementia there and they got the joke and I did not get the joke. The humiliation of it? Awful. but what's great is I tell the audience the story and they know what that feels like, maybe they never were quite as twatty as me but they feel for me in my twattiness because the walk back to my seat honestly took about 20 years about 20 years, it took two seconds to run down without the troll didn't get the troll wanted it so badly why is the word twat so good?

17:38it sounds so perfect it seems to have offended a lot of people Yeah, and I mean, I know that it can refer to genitals and it doesn't to me. To me, it's a gentle, a sort of a slap with a hug. It's the funniest word. And if I said to you, Fern, stop being such a twat. Yeah, I'm like, OK. Do you want me to tell you when you were a twat? Look at your face. Her face has changed now. I saw the most wonderful twatty thing you did and it was just yesterday. And I love you. I love you so much for this. I can't. Oh, my goodness. I love you so much for this. please have that hug first so you and all your kindness and your generosity which is huge with you she's looking at me over the top of her book she's so afraid i've got so much power at this moment um you with all your kindness decided to put on your insta stories how much you love this book yeah so this is how it went you hold up the book and you say can i just say that this book is...

18:40Oh, look at my eyebrows. Gosh, I've put far too much. I've done something to my eyebrows. I don't know what I've done. I've put too much on there. Anyway, yeah, I must be careful not to do that. Anyway, anyway, this book is... What's that? In the middle of praising the book, you notice something about yourself like we all do and thought, oh, look at that. I'll have a little moment thinking about that. And then anyway, back to business. I think it's really good to hear about social anxiety. I certainly have it. And again, that might surprise some people, might not surprise some people. I love communicating.

19:20I'm much better one-on-one with someone if I'm having a cup of tea with someone or at someone's house. But those big social situations, I feel exactly the same. I probably in my 20s did absolutely deal with it. drinking and just sort of yeah having a gin and tonic to sort of take the edge off now I just don't go out that's like my coping mechanism I just don't go I think so many people suffer with that and feel we can look around a room at a party or even something like all sitting in this tent today and assume that everybody else around us feels a level of comfort like they don't like they're coping all right with this social situation whereas probably 90 % of us are in our heads going am I sitting weird do I look all right what's my hair doing at the back I can't actually see what's going on right there.

20:01We're just worrying constantly about every little judgment that someone might have. And in our country, it's a go-to. Like, you know, cheers, you have a drink, it's someone's birthday, cheers. It's so ingrained in the way we sort of move through the year. So it's really good to sort of unpick that and look at what we use to ease that social anxiety. I also think it's really important in the conversation of, I guess, self-improvement. We're in this strange time where wellness is talked about a lot more and in good ways and maybe less helpful ways. And I sometimes feel a bit irked when we talk about self-improvement and there's this better version of us in the future.

20:46And that version of us will cope with life and everything is going to be fine. And I think we've got to find the middle ground with that, which I believe you've found really perfectly. So you make changes, you lose things that aren't working for you, but you don't become this brand new person and then sort of hate on the old you. I think it's so important in this self-improvement journey, whatever language you want to use, that we can look back and not abandon old versions of ourselves. Because I certainly went through a phase where I thought, oh, God, I'm so embarrassed by young me. Oh, my God, cringe like me on kids TV.

21:20Hey, doing all this stuff. Embarrassed, don't want to look at it, abandoned. and that's the worst thing you can do we've got to change and grow but not ditch parts of ourselves I think that's it's a fine line and it's really tricky to do but it's imperative if you want to feel okay yeah and it's a hard one isn't it yeah like so I struggled so much with the with the version of me that was presented in the early 20s you know and like uh for a long time I've distance myself from that image but I've got to take accountability you know like regardless of the fact that I was on a show and there was pressure and there was whatever else like I did do those things and like regardless of whether the cameras were on or not I probably would have behaved in a very similar way that's just who I was you know I was brash I was aggressive I was lost I was misguided and I was struggling to deal with things that were going on at home and I used alcohol as a coping mechanism, right?

22:18And it would be dead easy for us to be like, oh, but I don't recognize that girl now. Like I drink green juice and I do 5am yoga and I give birth to an avocado. But it's not fair. If it wasn't for that girl, I wouldn't be where I am now. And we need to stop being so hard on ourselves because in 10 years time, this version of me here, I'm not going to recognize her either. doesn't mean she wasn't great doesn't mean that she didn't like she she didn't like grow and change and evolve and try and be better and do brilliant things like you've just got to exercise a little bit of like compassion and grace and understand every time that you are in a place that's exactly where you're meant to be yeah i read somewhere that there's this like when i when i just movement, you know?

23:09When I just lose that stone, I'm going to go on the date, naps. Like, when I just get a bit better, I'm going to do this. When I just get a bit better in my job, I'm going to apply for that promotion. And if you're always waiting for that when-if moment, you're never going to get fucking anything. Yeah. You're not. Like, seize the date. Is that how the quote actually ended? Yeah, that's exactly... I believe I've recorded it for better um but no like you're just never gonna get any of the things you deserve if you're always waiting to be somebody better you're never going to get these lovely little moments in life you know like I met my fella right and I was not healed from my past relationship like I absolutely wasn't I was still struggling I was processing trauma and everybody around us was going just just wait just wait you you don't want to like throw yourself into something new and blah blah and all this and I was letting this get into my head right and I was thinking it is too soon it is too soon it was my makeup artist at the time and she was like what are you waiting for she was like what what are you waiting for she went what you're gonna do if you don't go out with him are you just gonna sit in the house and cry again and I was thinking that was what I had planned she was like you need to start getting yourself out there and I did I put myself out there and I went on a date with him and I texted the group chat that night and said to me mates I went buy a fucking hat yes because he's the one and if I had there he is yeah he's the right I can and we all were getting married next year okay as promised some behind the scenes stuff do you use the happy place app if so you'll know that on there I read some really gorgeous sleepy stories to help you drift off at night.

24:57The thing is, those stories were not one-take wonders. I'm about to let you into the reality of recording very serious things in the studio with producer Anushka and engineer Alan. Maybe best to skip this bit if you're not a fan of a few swears. The click of his camera added a mechanical novelty. Oh, sorry.

25:25Hi, this is Knox from the Popcast with Knox and Jamie. And maybe like us at the Popcast, you also know people who have been smokers or vapers. And Zen is the one product it seems like everyone is talking about. Because there are many good reasons to make a change to Zen nicotine pouches. Reasons like Zen nicotine pouches are still America's number one choice for smoke-free, hands-free nicotine satisfaction. And you can choose between 10 varieties, each variety available in either 3 or 6 milligrams. Check out zen.com slash find to find Zen at a store near you. Warning, this product contains nicotine.

25:56Nicotine is an addictive chemical. The market's uncertain. Revenue's tight and hiring on hold. That's why results-driven companies are using Upwork to keep work moving. Go to Upwork.com today and start hiring proven freelance talent fast. No bulky overhead. No rigid long-term contracts. Just the right expert right when you need them. Work smarter and faster with Upwork. Go to Upwork.com now and find your freelance expert. That's U-P-W-O-R-K dot com. Post a job for free and get started today. Dr. India Woods here. As a veterinarian, I demand a lot of my scrubs on the job. That's why I show up in FIGS.

26:36FIGS are made for the sometimes crazy situations I find myself in. It doesn't matter if I have to squat, sit, bend, or even chase after one of my patients. FIGS moves with me and keeps me comfortable in the highest pressure situations. Figs gives me one less thing to worry about Get 15 % off your first order By visiting wearfigs.com And use code FIGSRX at checkout That's wearfigs.com Code FIGSRX

27:18Paint flaked off as we settled ourselves on the old wood bench. Oh, no, I just made it up a whole fucking sentence. I added some words. Sorry, let's just do that again. Just like with a free flow now, guys, and do my own story. It sounds right, they should do it like that. Yeah, I'm going to just do my own one. OK. Yeah, and then they took out their iPad and watched a film. And sacked off the view. Right, OK. Then he'd gently run his hand along the surface of the wood to sense its age and sturdiness. Look underneath it. For fuck's sake!

28:06I thought I'd picked a safer one. You haven't!

28:15OK. Fucking hell. Various points up its bulky length. Does the story even need... Does the story need this line? Like, is it integral to the storyline? I was really trying... OK. Is that OK? We'll call you in. We'll just get past curly hairs and then think you can come back in. The humongous trunk was at least a... I forgot that bit. Well, it's in hindsight. Sorry, I didn't realise you were going to stop. I thought you'd have to... I forgot. OK, let's pick a different one. Let's pick the bark was tough. That's all right, yeah. Sorry, I'm really sorry. Shake it out. OK, I'm going to think of really awfully sad things now, guys.

29:12I'm going to have to it's the only way and it's going to be worse when you still laugh because you're going to feel like a shit person fucking hell

29:23oh dear I can't look at either of you I'm over here doing official work I don't know when you're going to answer me but oh god we are screwed okay very serious

29:45Do you know what? Sometimes I just listen back to those when I need to cry with laughter. Exercise whatever demons are going on inside. It's just ridiculous. I really hope the last half hour or so has helped you feel that bit lighter, whatever you're going through right now. If you need one last push to get there, may I offer you some laughter yoga from the Happy Place Festival last year?

30:27You can't not laugh if everyone else is laughing around you. That is a fact. More of that gorgeous joy at this year's festivals at Chiswick House and Tatton Park. So do head to happyplaceofficial.co.uk to get your tickets. I would love to have a good old laugh with you there. Massive thanks to Fat Timbo, Adele Roberts, Dawn French, Vicky Patterson, to cackling producer Anushka Tate at Happy Place Studios, and to you. Go on, have a giggle.

31:30We'll see you next time.

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