This is an advert for NowTV Sky Cinema Press and Entertainment Pass. Cinema Pass lets you see the best movies, Entertainment Pass lets you see the best TV. I adore NowTV. It's my favourite streaming service. It's the one I use the most. Usually I'm more of an Entertainment Pass person watching box sets. But this month I've been I've been having a go at the Cinema Pass and I found myself watching films more and more. One film that's on NowTV right now that I strongly recommend is it's called A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood.

Right. And firstly it's got Tom Hanks. You can't go wrong with Tom Hanks, who's got a problem with Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks just delivers the goods. Tom Hanks is like custard, custard, well-made custard. Who talks shit about custard genuinely, you know what I mean?

It's custard. It's sweet. It's vanilla. It's viscose. You can you can eat custard when you're sick. I like watching Tom Hanks when I'm sick, actually. Yeah, so Tom Hanks is custard. No one's talking shit about, it's custard, so that's Tom Hanks and he does a lovely job of being the custard in A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood. Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood is ...

It's about ... There's an American children's TV entertainer who's a legend in America, but we don't really know about him like in Ireland or over in the UK.

This is a fella called Mr. Rogers and a very, very interesting person, someone I might do a podcast on at some point. Incredibly interesting person. Mr. Rogers wasn't just an American TV presenter, children's TV presenter. He was a children's TV presenter who pioneered children's television and not just as entertainment, but looking at using TV through educational psychology, using TV, TV as a unique way to communicate to children how they can better understand their emotions. And Mr. Rogers is a legend, but we don't know about him here.

But, A Beautiful day in the Neighbourhood, is like a biography of Mr. Rogers with Mr. Rogers played by Tom Hanks, which is perfect casting.

But it's not just a straight up biography. It's I won't spoil anything, but it's one of the most creative biopics I've ever seen.

So I strongly recommend that you can get it on NowTV. A Beautiful day in the Neighbourhood. You can't go wrong. It's like me saying to you do you want some custard? Yeah, course I want custard. You mad? Of course I want custard. Go on, go and watch some custard of rub it into your eyes. A Beautiful day in the Neighbourhood. Get it on NowTV. Get your seven day, seven day free trial just search for NowTV.

All right. The ... that film there is on the Sky Cinema Pass and then if you want class TV shows, that's the Entertainment Pass.

Past the Bostik, you caustic Brosnans.

Welcome to the Blindboy Podcast, what's the craic? If you're a brand new listener, be sure and listen to some earlier episodes so that you can become acquainted with the lore and mythology and universe of this podcast. For the regular listeners, hello. I'm still watching the crown.

I'm on season two of The Crown now and I love it, I fucking love it. I'm very happy to have found the crown. All right. And it's very challenging and I have to at all times keep an anti-colonial criticality. All right, when I'm watching this, I have to I have to remind myself that I'm not enjoying Prince Philip. I am enjoying the charming portrayal of Prince Philip by Matt Smith. I don't actually want to go on the lash and paint the town red with Princess Margaret.

I merely endeared by the fantastic portrayal of her by the actress Vanessa Kirby. So I have to remind myself of all these things. Look, I look at the fucking Sopranos. I don't approve of the Mafia. You know what I mean? So, fuck it, I'm enjoying the crown, OK, it's it's making my days. I'm doing nothing. I'm at home, I'm at home and fucking quarantine. And I watched the crown with my dinner. And it's the one bit of relaxation I have.

It's my one escape. Other than that, I'm just working. So that's my escape to sit down and fucking enjoy the crown and try not to binge watch it one episode a day. All right. Maybe two, maybe two. But that's it. All right. Fuck the royal family. Thank you for the the kind messages I got a lot of kind messages for last week's podcast, which was ... It was around the theme mental health. About Gestalt psychology, which was a school of psychology that I found quite difficult to explain and democratise, so we did it via the metaphor of the exploding corpse of a king.

But thank you for the kind messages for it and I'm just noticing ... There's a big hunger, there's a big hunger out there for podcasts where I'm speaking about emotional, issues around emotional regulation and mental health and coping and management. I'm just getting a big vibe of ye that. That's ... It's ... Your appreciating it, it's what you're looking for and of course, like it's tough right now, it's tough right now. There's not only are we in lockdown in a pandemic, but.

Like, it's fucking November, and the thing is, with November in western countries like Christmas is a construct and before it was Christmas and Christ, there's always been celebrations around this time of year because it's tough, like Jesus Christ today was just dark, the entire day was literally dark. I had the lights on in the house all day. It was just dark all day and it's it's the thing is, it's not that that's necessarily sad. It's that when when I get up and it's 10 o'clock in the morning and it's fucking dark outside, then I now I now have to ... There's emotional labor involved in staying happy.

That's the thing with winter. It's it's not so much that winter is very sad, it's that it requires quite a bit of emotional labor to cope with it, you know what I mean? And that can be draining. And the whole purpose of Christmas, Christmas is this spectacular pageant that lasts a month, which tries to help with that emotional labor. Going into town and everybody's out and there's lights everywhere and you've got your freezing cold Christmas pints.

These are all well established rituals that help us to cope with the emotional labor of fucking winter. And now it's gone. Like, fuck'n I was in town in Limerick. There's no one there. It's like Limerick is empty anyway, but it's especially empty during, during fucking lockdown. I don't even know if they've put the Christmas lights up and there's no one having Christmas pints. So all our trinkets have been taken away. So I'm really feeling the hunger out there for me, sending me messages to speak about ways of coping, let's just call it that way, ways of fucking coping and emotional regulation and dealing with mental health and just speaking about it. And I like doing it as well. I love doing last week's podcast. I loved it. I like. I thoroughly enjoy doing mental health podcasts because it acts as therapy for me. It's it's it's cathartic, I'm exploring my own emotional landscape, I'm getting feelings and making those feelings into ideas and words and concepts, and then they're released.

They're no longer in my in my being as frustrations that influence my behaviour there, I'm naming them. I'm taking ownership of them, I'm naming them, you know. So I'm going to speak a little bit more this week in a mental health emotional regulation capacity for you to enjoy. But before I do that, just to give you a little heads up, a warning for about the next ten minutes. I want to, I want to address some issues around sexual abuse.

And I'd like to just give a warning whenever I do that, because not everybody is in the headspace to be hearing that or to be listening to it. So if you'd rather not, you can skip forward by about 10 minutes and you don't have to hear it. But yet this week in Ireland or last week one of the biggest stories in the news was ... There was this massive ... I don't know if leak is the word for it. A load of fucking Irish lads.

I believe the number 500 lads were uploading. Sexual images of Irish women without any consent. On to an online forum and like 500 lads were basically trading and sharing. Sexual images of Irish women without their consent. Some of them were children. Some of the images were of children and the guards are involved. And it's opened up a national dialogue around what's called, "revenge porn". And I say, quote unquote, "revenge porn" because.

"Revenge porn" is a word that's that's the word that's used by the media, people who are activists in this area. They don't like the word "revenge porn". It's inaccurate in the same way that the word child porn is inaccurate. Instead, the appropriate word is image based sexual abuse, because it's more accurate, that's what it is, its image based sexual abuse. It's not pornography, porn suggests enjoyment, and there's no such thing as porn when consent isn't present.

That's not pornography. That's abuse. You know what I mean? And I want to mention it because. It's one of these issues men will listen to another man speaking about it, but men won't listen to a woman speaking about it, which that in itself is shit and is part of. The culture that needs to be deconstructed to stop, to tackle and to fight this type of shit. Sharing sexual images of a person without their consent isn't a crime in Ireland at the moment.

As far as I know, it's going to be made a crime, the specific legislation that's being put forward. There's a lot of people angry that has not being put forward soon enough. And there's a lot of people angry that the legislation itself isn't good enough, that it's not specific enough in its definitions. It's again, in the media. It's been referred to as revenge porn. Image based sexual abuse is the correct term. I don't have any sweeping hot take.

I don't have any deep analysis of it, if someone sends you a sexual photo, then the contract of consent right there and then is that that's for you. And if you then take that photograph and upload it on the Internet for a lot of people to look at, there's no longer consent. And that's that's wrong. It's deeply, deeply wrong. It's image based sexual abuse. I reckon the lads who were the 500 lads in that server knew well it was wrong and did it anyway.

I really don't think, I don't think they were anyone was ignorant there. Going, oh, this is. Oh, really? Oh, really? I thought it was for everyone. No, I think they knew it was fucking wrong and did it anyway. These are dangerous lads. Engaging in image based sexual assault and they're emboldened and thrilled by the lack of consent, and it needs to be viewed that way. And if your gut reaction to that is, well, if you don't want your, if you don't want someone leaking your photos all over the Internet, then don't take or send the photos to somebody in the first place.

No, fuck that, that is ... That's just a modern digital version of the old story of shaming and policing women for enjoying sex, that's "slut shaming". No, no, no, no. All right. Sexting between consensual adults is a healthy expression of human sexuality. If you personally don't want to do it, if you are not into it. There you go. You've just defined boundaries of your own consent and you're entitled to that. All right.

But other people doing it, adults consenting, that's a healthy expression of human sexuality and it's their business. So don't go shaming that. But if someone sends you an image and it's for you, don't text it to your friend, don't upload it to the Internet. It's very, very simple. The consequences for it are ... The real life consequences for the women who are affected are massive. And those women that had their images put on the Internet, a lot of them are doxxed, a lot of them were harassed, it created massive amounts of stress, humiliation.

There's mental health issues that can arise, the risk of suicide. Just don't participate in it, understand why it's wrong. I mean, there's a much bigger systematic issue, I just hope that the education system. From the earliest age is the sex education is overhauled to include more about consent and that it's modernised. To speak about this stuff to kids at the earliest possible age in a in a in a manner that's appropriate to whatever age they are, you know,

I want to recommend a podcast around this stuff. Right. Dr Caroline West is a doctor of sexuality studies. She's Irish. We actually we had a conversation a few years back in front of a college audience, but it wasn't recorded. But Caroline West has got a podcast called Glow West. Which is all about it's about sex, it's about consent, it's about porn. She's a doctor of this. Really interesting in particular, Episode 24, which I want you to I want to recommend to ye as well it will send some traffic towards her podcast and she's got an episode called "revenge porn", a.k.a. image based Sexual Abuse, where she speaks with two activists, two Irish activists around this.

And I'm going to recommend you take a listen to that and listen to our whole all the episodes of her podcast, because she's on the ball and she's an expert in this area. And I'm recommending that not only because it's a brilliant podcast and Caroline is an expert in her field, but because for lads in particular, to start listening to more women, listening to the voices and opinions of more women around these issues, because it gets brought to my attention quite a bit that there's lads who.

Listen to things when I say it. And the women around him are saying this shit and they only listen to it when Blindboy says it, and that's mortifying for me.

And it's also it's it's like it's like pissing against the fucking wind, I'm just repeating what I have heard women saying, that's all I'm doing. And then the bar is so low that I end up getting pats on the back for simply saying anything. So. Just start listening to more women around these things and don't rely on me to translate those things into a man's voice, that's fucking ridiculous. So this week, I'm going to speak a little bit more about some mental health things, because that's what you've been requesting, that you've been requesting, as I mentioned earlier, long, dark days and no Christmas.

Things are getting tough, so what I'd like to look into this week, I want to look at anger and the relationship that anger can have with depression, so. If I had to sum up my personal, mental health approach in one word. And this is what I've learned from over a decade of doing this shit. The one word I'd use is proactive.

And the opposite of proactive is reactive. OK, so my goal and journey on a daily and weekly basis, my mental health, I proactively manage my mental health so that I never have to react. OK, I don't want to be pulling myself out of depression. I don't want to be. Talking myself down from an anxiety attack, those are both reactive positions I want to ensure in a proactive fashion that I don't find myself experiencing depression, are experiencing anxiety, OK?

And if I'm proactive. I can spot. I have a good enough understanding yourself, understanding of my own relationship, my own mental health that, I. I can spot the earliest, earliest signs of mental health issues, so I try and catch. The seeds of a panic attack two months in advance, three months in advance, and I do this through years and years of self awareness, understanding my triggers, most importantly, understanding that the earliest possible toxic behaviours that I engage in, the earliest possible toxic behaviours and understanding the environmental triggers that bring them on. So, the biggest one for me is procrastination. If I find myself procrastinate and I'm talking the smallest things, if I find myself.

Usually something like an unanswered e-mail, if an important e-mail comes in, and for whatever reason, my mind just bats it away instead of opening it, the e-mail gives me a little fright, a little fright or the e-mail coming in feels a little bit overwhelming and I decide I'm not opening that now. And then four days have gone and now I have an email that's unopened and it's important, and now this tiny email is four days down the line and it's it's now now it's a bigger problem.

Now I have the the slight shame and embarrassment of a person thinking that I've ignored them, when, in fact it was just for some reason felt a little bit overwhelming and I didn't respond. So that to me is always the earliest, earliest sign that. What it means to me is something about my environment. And by environment, I mean my workload, my relationships with other people, the length of the fucking days, the temperature of my gaff.

All these different things, my diet, my exercise, whatever, my environment is probably slightly overwhelming and stressful and I'm not taking note of the stress and it's now manifesting itself as an email from someone I'm supposed to do some work with is coming in and now I'm ignoring an email. And it's not a conscious decision I'm not, like, fuck this e-mail. It's just it comes in and I go, no, I'll do that later. And then more e-mails are coming in or different tasks that I'm supposed to do because, see now, I'm anxious about the first e-mail. Because now I've actually created a problem, I've created the problem of fuck, I've left this person unread for five fucking days. Now, I think I'm going to go back and lie to them because you're not going to just say it's been overwhelming. You have to lie and say, I'm sorry I didn't see this, which is stressful in itself.

And the pressure that now has caused me to procrastinate some other stuff. And now I've got ... My fucking studio's untidy now. You know, I'm avoiding and now I'm engaged in avoidant behaviours and the avoidance behaviours that I'm engaging in to get away from the procrastination, the avoidance behaviours, they're usually things that. Give me kind of simple endorphin hits, so spending too much time on social media. Wanting to get the endorphin hit from a fuck'n Instagram like or a retweet.

To avoid. This procrastination going for the easy hits, the empty easy hits. Now all of a sudden I'm playing I'm playing a bit too many video games instead of working and I'm playing video games too much or I'm watching too much television. And this is now like a six or seven day spiral, all because I didn't answer one email a week ago. And now I have all these new problems and these new unhealthy like ... What's the healthy way to deal with the problems? You fucking do them.

That's the healthy way. The healthy way is. Here's a task. This needs to get done. Last week I spoke about gestalt and task completion when an email comes in and it's important and I feel overwhelmed are some anxiety and I don't answer it. What I've done there is I haven't completed the gestalt of opening that email. That email has a journey. Email comes in. Next step. I open the email, I read it, then I respond to the email.

Task is done and I feel a little sense of completion, but for whatever reason. That gestalt that isn't getting isn't getting completed something larger is stressing me out, and for whatever reason, this email has become the object of the thing I need to avoid. And now I have an incomplete gestalt. And when I have that incomplete journey of procrastinating around the e-mail, I've got this frustration and I'm building up all this negative, negative, toxic energy is a shit word for it.

There's probably a better word for it, but that's what it is. It's negative, toxic, toxic energy. And now I'm going to meaningless behaviours, so. Spending too much time on social media is meaningless, spending too much time playing video games is meaningless. Spending too much time watching TV is meaningless by meaningless. I mean, the Internet can have meaning. So can video games. So can watching TV. You can do these things meaningfully.

Right. But you are we all know the tipping point when it's no longer meaningful. It's kind of like when a chocolate bar is lovely. Right, and you can have a meaningful chocolate bar, you can you can have a chocolate bar that is just fucking lovely and it's just the right amount and you feel great, haven't eaten it. But we all know the feeling of eating chocolate or biscuits that's completely meaningless. It's trying to stuff our faces with some simple sugary treat and it feels good and horrible in equal parts.

That's a meaningless behaviour. And when my mental health is at risk at the earliest stages, I engage in meaningless behaviours to try and give myself this endorphin hit. But it I can feel it as this vibrating stress in my body.

I'm certainly not happy playing the video game. I feel this tension and apathy. I'm not happy. I'm not making the right food choices now. I'd rather have a takeaway than engage in ... the journey of a meaningful dinner and satiate myself, if I allow this continue now for two weeks, two and a half weeks. All because of this one e-mail and now there are several e-mails that I haven't answered because I'm thinking I have to go back and answer the first one and now theres a dirty studio.

And now I'm behind on deadlines and stuff. Now, I've really created a genuine, overwhelming situation for myself, coupled with the fact that.

Not being a ... I now have a sense of shame as well, I feel a certain degree of shame. I feel shame because I wasn't able to answer the e-mail. I feel shame because I'm procrastinating. I'm putting people off. I feel shame because I'm not eating properly. I feel shame because instead of working, I'm engaged in a mean, meaningless behaviour. And then the shame begins to affect my self-esteem. And now that my self-esteem is affected now I start to feel less capable.

So the part of me that actually rationally says, go on, answer the fucking e-mail, go and clean the studio, go and make a better dinner. Now, that part of myself that's able to go from that thought to actions that's been weakened, the shame and the effect on my self-esteem has weakened my ability to enact change in my life. And I'm only three weeks into this now. And that feeling of being incapable can grow and grow and grow until the smallest thing now seems impossible.

And then I start to feel like I'm withdrawing socially now, I can't go out now anyway because of the fucking coronavirus. But that right there, over the past 10 years that's usually as far as I let it go. I've gotten to those situations where I feel incapable, but that's as far as I let it go and I usually don't. But like I know that beyond that, if I go another month with that, that's when Mr. Anxiety attack happens.

And I haven't had a fucking anxiety attack in over a decade. But if I do six weeks of that in total, Mr. Anxiety attack is there. And I also know if I let myself get as far as anxiety attacks.

Then what follows on from that is depression. That's my pattern. Now, I don't if I get as far as anxiety attack, I've lost opportunity to be proactive and now I must be reactive. Reactive is when you've reached crisis point and you are now I don't want to say fixing, fixing is the wrong word, but when I when I get as far as panic attacks, I'm losing a sense of agency. At that point, I'm genuinely my capacity to help myself is reduced.

And that's where I might need to seek help from someone else or medication or whatever. And also, I don't I don't have the full faculty of my thoughts when I'm at that stage. I'm thinking back to when I used to be there. I've told you before, I used to literally be afraid of my shadow. You know, in the throes of anxiety, and that doesn't mean in the middle of an attack, the bits around an attack. I used to be afraid of my shadow.

I used to think that my shadow was. I used to depersonalise. So I don't want to get to that level of mental ill health, I don't want to get to the situation where being reactive, it's when it's that's too late for me. So I try and manage things proactively. Another early red flag for me is ... number one is always procrastination. That's me personally, number one, always procrastination. And then what arises from that five days down the line?

Anger. Anger is a big one for me. Anger and lose and a sense of resilience becoming sensitive to. Comments or critique, my job is online, my job is on the Internet, so I obviously receive quite a lot of negative comments every single day, and that's part of my job. And in general, I just I don't give a fuck about them genuinely. I just go ... sure look, this is another person on the Internet who's pissed off today.

If the critique is genuine, I take it on board. But most of the time it's not, it's just people calling me a prick and that's fine. And that's what happens when you have a large online presence. But sometimes if I find myself if someone said something negative to me online and I'm walking away from the computer and I find myself being angry about it all day or hurt by it or offended. Now, I know that's another signal for me that, OK, I need to accept, I need to do something, I need to I need to be proactive now about my mental health, because I shouldn't be bothered by that comment there online or I shouldn't be ignoring an important e-mail or I shouldn't be doing three hours on the fucking Xbox when really all I needed was a half an hour.

I shouldn't be getting Chinese takeaway for dinner when I should really be preparing my own wholesome, healthy meal from scratch and going to the shop and buying the ingredients. So with that self-awareness of knowing what my steps and triggers are.

I then I take responsibility for them before they get out of hand and how I do it, I just kick myself in the ass. I literally I do my CBT, I write down. There's an unanswered e-mail and I write down, why are you not answering the e-mail? And I can't think of a good answer. How hard would it be to to respond to that e-mail right now? So I do it. I respond to the fucking e-mail the first time and I ignored I respond to it.

I completely gestalt. And now I'm reversing the process. Now I feel a little victory. And then I do the next task, and before, you know, I have cleaned my fucking studio and now I've gained self-esteem back, my self-esteem has come back because I've shown myself these things that I was scared of. I've now overcome them, even though they're small. I have a sense of achievement. I have a sense of control again, and I've rolled back.

Now my mental health is being repaired again. No, I don't want to play Xbox because I'm feeling good about doing some work and I don't want to eat shit for dinner because I'm feeling good about cooking and the process has been reversed. And I've proactively taken myself out of an unhealthy cycle and avoided anxiety attacks in two months time. And I do that our true self awareness to knowing myself. But understanding why I procrastinate, understanding why I get angry, you know what I mean?

Also what to do as part of my proactive approach, when when I identify negative patterns of myself, I immediately go back to meditation. I do, I meditate daily, 15 minutes a day, because for me personally, meditation is the best way for me to to truly listen to my emotions when I'm under stress, when I'm stressed, when there's pressure, I'm not listening. I'm not sitting with my emotions and truly feeding them. I'm not truly listening to anger.

I'm not listening to frustration. I'm instead I'm using defense mechanisms. I'm using defense mechanisms and ignoring the true emotions until they express themselves in, irrational behaviour, not answering an email, an important email comes in and I don't answer it, even though I should that's irrational. It's not rational. It doesn't make sense. So if I seem to be engaging in a simple little irrational behaviour like that, I'm probably using some type of emotional defense mechanism.

And that's how it's manifested in my behaviour in an unhealthy behaviour, a harmful behaviour. And so what I want to look at this week specifically is anger, because so many messages I received from people. Are about them experiencing a sense of anger and I think just a personal heartache. I think the reason I'm. Seeing a lot of people asking me about anger is because of the fucking pandemic. There's a lot of stress. Our freedoms have been restricted for a fuck'n year.

Our freedoms have been restricted. We can't we can't go to the shop. We can't do the things that we previously enjoyed. These things have been taken away. It's outside of our control. We're trying our best to manage it. But that energy has to go somewhere. There's also a relationship between anger and depression. So I'd like I'd like to take a proactive look at anger, speak to some of the conditions and emotions and ways of thinking and feeling when you're experiencing anger to proactively look at this, take ownership of it so that in two months time the anger might might not express itself as depression, which needs a more reactive approach.

But before we do that, it's time for the little ocarina pause. The little sweet ocarina prass and I think we're going to do the prass ... Ocarina prass, we do a combined ocarina and shaker today.

So the ocarina pause, if you don't know ... There are adverts digitally inserted into this podcast.

OK, at three part in this podcast. There is an advert inserted, OK, and I don't know what it's going to be. It'll depend upon your algorithm, but so you don't get a nasty fright from an advert. Here's a little pause.

Ocarina and shaker.

Oh, how pleasant was that ocarina and shaker there and in the middle of that, you heard an advert for something. I don't know what it was, could have been bullshit. An d this podcast is supported by you, the listener, because this is a listener funded podcast. No one tells me what to talk about. I've got full editorial control, complete creative control over the entire podcast to say whatever the fuck I want, speak about whatever I want.

I don't have to stay away from certain subjects because it might frighten off brands or advertisers. There's two types of people this week on the social media sphere in Ireland, lads, if you have a decent following, there's those of us who got put into a government report because we were criticising the government. And then there's those of us who got free PlayStation 5. I did not get a free PlayStation 5 and a lot of people got fucking free PlayStation 5's.

Not me, but. Yeah, a lot of the I'm very political and this scares the shit out of brands and I don't give a fuck. It doesn't matter because I have the Patreon. If you like this podcast, if you're listening to it regularly, just please consider paying me for the work that I'm doing. That's all I'm asking. Pay me for the work I'm doing. It's a lot of work.

I love fucking doing it, but I also love earning a living, doing what I love. So, Patreon.com/theblindboypodcast. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. And if you can't afford it, you don't have to, you don't have to pay it. If you can afford it, then what you're doing is paying for somebody who can't afford to listen. So everybody gets a podcast.

I earn a living. It's fantastic. And I don't have to such too much corporate flute. I don't. I can only suck, I can suck the corporate flute that I want to. But I don't have to suck the carpet float that I don't want to. I can tell them to fuck off and the podcast gets paid for by the community of people that listen to it. Join me in my utopia. All right. Subscribe to the podcast, recommend it to a friend, share it.

Come join me on Twitch. Let's I'm having tremendous crack on Twitch three nights a week. All right. It's free livestream and I'm writing a musical to a video game, a never ending musical. Writing songs to a digital version of the Wild West. And it's great fucking craic. And you can come on, you can chat with me. And I strongly recommend you join me on Twitch. It's good fun. I usually mention as well, like.

I can't do gigs, I haven't been able to do gigs for a year because of the pandemic, which is true, but the year of not doing gigs. I do miss gigs, I do, and I don't miss gigs. All right, I think when we come out of this pandemic, I'm definitely going to be doing a lot less gigs. I'm going to be doing a lot less gigs because I'm getting older now and I've been gig'n a long time throughout my fucking 20s.

Now, I'm in my 30s and I was gigging nearly three times a month. There given every weekend away to fuck'n traveling all around the place. And I think I think once gigs are allowed, I'm going to lay off the gigs a bit and only really do ones that I'm really, really excited about. You know what I mean, that's that's one thing I've taken from this pandemic, it's forced me to chill the fuck out because I work a little bit too much.

And even without the gigs, The Patreon has been paying my way. And when we come out of the pandemic, I'm going to I'll have the Patreon. I'm going to start writing a new book, and I'll do gigs that I want to do. And I try ... Plus as well, to be honest, the pandemic scared the living fuck out of me. Like, if I didn't have the Patreon. I'd literally have no income at all because it took book sales away, it took gigs away, it took television opportunities away, you know what I mean?

It made me freaked out that, like, fuck it if I didn't have the Patreon. And I put my eggs in all those three baskets, I'd have nothing. I wouldn't know what I'd be doing right now. I don't know what I even even being an artist, would I be looking for a different job, you know? I mean, I'm grateful of the terror of coronavirus for. Making me realise that, making me realise that gigs alone is a kind of an old school way of looking at things, that there's different ways.

So want to anger with depression, right? Generally with depression, when depression is is assessed within the school of cognitive psychology, three indicators need to be present. If a person has a negative view of themselves and negative view of the future and a negative view of other people in the world. So a negative view of self, negative view of the future and a negative view of other people of the world. When all three of those mindsets are present pervasively, that person will experience what we call depression.

OK, now negative can mean many things. We think of depression as as just a sadness. But anyone who is ... when I had depression experienced it as a nothingness, as as an inability to experience hope. Negative view can also mean not just sadness, it can mean a fearfulness. You know, you can be fearful of your future, you can be afraid of other people, you can be afraid of the world, or you can be fucking angry.

You can be furious. You can be angry with the world. You can be angry about the future. You can be angry about other people, and this can also be something that leads to and presents his depression. So how do we know we're experiencing are suffering from anger? A good one is to check in with our body and the body, it's strange, the body. We can hold a lot of emotions in our body and we're really not aware of them until we point them out to ourselves, I find out about my body through mindfulness meditation and body scans.

I will literally meditate and you can look these you can look up a body scan, meditation online, and it means me sitting down with my eyes closed and breathing, counting my breaths, getting real calm, and then I do a visual scan of all of my body, I check in with every from my head to my toes, I. In my mind's eye, check in with every part of my body, and if I have anger that I'm not aware of.

Because I know that's that sounds odd. It's like, how could you not be aware of anger if your entire day is consumed by anger, it just becomes the way that you are in that day and you tend not to notice it. You tend not to be really cognisant or fully aware of it, so I check in my body. And I'll notice my jaw. Your jaw would be clenched. A lot of the day, you might grind your fucking teeth in your sleep.

Trembling or shaking at a certain thoughts will enter your head and you might tremble or shake your fist would clench throughout a lot of the day without knowing it you've got your fucking fist clenched, your heart will be racing a lot of the time. You might feel hotter. These are the ... then that always leads to neck pains, pains in the neck and the shoulders, because you're tense in the muscles of the fuck'n neck and the muscles of the face for a long time and tiring them out until it's actually sore.

And now you've got neck pain. And anyone who's familiar with neck pain, you know, you might get the headache as a result of neck pain, too. So these are physical indicators that you might be experiencing anger a lot in your day. What are the. The psychological. The psychological kind of way of being if you're experiencing anger, right? That the thing would anger is a huge part of your day. I think out of out of all the emotions, anger in particular, will most keep you out of the present moment.

If you've ever been furious about something and you get into your car and do a drive and you spend the whole drive fantasising about the person that you're angry with and going over in your head, arguments, winning arguments with them. You won't even realise that you've reached your fucking destination. You could be in the car an hour and it's like you just downloaded yourself to a location because the intensity of anger to take us out of our present environment, our present moment, it's very powerful like that.

You might find yourself fantasising about hurting someone. It could be a fucking stranger. It could be someone close to you, but you fantasise about saying really mean things to him. Are physically hitting them. And gritting your teeth and throughout your day, almost finding yourself physically as if you're in a fight. Swingin' digs without even knowing the person you're thinking about, it could be your fucking boss. It could be someone at work. It could be a family member.

You might be unaware of why you have this intense anger towards them. So then you kind of you spend your days searching for reasons to prove to yourself what this person is acting maliciously towards you, you're thinking about that thing they said yesterday that was deliberate. They asked me to stay on longer because of this, because they fucking hate me. They know exactly what they're doing. And you don't necessarily have evidence for us. But what you're doing is making making reality fit the evidence just to justify the seething hatred that's inside you towards them that you don't really know why it is, but, you know, it feels real. And now you're plotting revenge, you're plotting revenge. On a person because you have manufactured evidence that they're trying to hurt, now you're actually, now this person might receive some vitriol. You might believe that this person is standing in the way of some goal that you have. There might not be evidence for it. But you say to yourself, if only it wasn't for them.

If it wasn't for them, I'd have this. I could do that. But they are in the way. Now, you're on edge not just with the person or persons that you're fantasising angrily about, but you're on edge for anybody who's around you. People are feeling as if they have to walk on eggshells. The slightest ... you lose your tolerance for another person's fallibility. Usually someone close to someone close to you says something silly or loses the fucking TV remote or doesn't put enough milk into your tea.

And now all of a sudden you're snapping at an innocent party or getting angry with your fucking dog. Your dog is barking too much because they want to go out for a piss and you're screaming at your dog. And every aspect of your behaviour now is becoming filled with rage and anger. And what I'm describing there, that's unhealthy anger, all right, there's healthy anger and there's unhealthy anger and unhealthy anger is the one. It's the one that consumes you.

It's based in rage, fantasising about revenge, fantasising about hurting people, reliving conversations and arguments over and over again, trying to win them in your head, spending a lot of time thinking about another person not being in the here and now, not being in the present moment, having a real blockage, an inability and lack of desire to empathise or see something from another's point of view. Becoming consumed with the certainty of how right you are. About your own anger and one of the most disempowering things about that type of unhealthy anger and one of the most unhelpful things about it is.

You might actually have a gripe with someone. Like. If it's your boss or co-worker, you might actually have a basis for conflict, there are you might actually be being treated a little bit unfairly. But the problem is, is that when when when you're trapped in this. Fantasy cycle of rage, revenge, hurt ... right. There's no way for you to confront that person and actually meet your needs if what's actually required is for you to say to someone what you said, I didn't like what you said, what you're doing needs to stop.

Can we do this in a different way? You're not going to have access to that type of rationality. And the other thing, too, is most of us. The fantasies, the unhealthy anger, the fantasies of causing physical harm, screaming at someone. Revenge. Society are often the fantasies aren't in line with what society deems acceptable. So you don't you're not going to head butt your fucking boss. You might fantasise about head butting your boss, but you won't because you still know that.

But that's losing my job and going to jail. So most people it doesn't get to the point where they explode. But the thing is. You're still aware of the capacity to explode and then you become fearful of the potential of your anger, and then you can't meet your needs of actual conflict. So you become afraid of the person. You become afraid of the tiniest disagreement. Because the tiniest disagreement with that person means explosion. Absolute explosion, and then you start to feel powerless towards them in this continual fantasy of anger and powerlessness, feeling weak, feeling dominant, feeling weak, feeling dominant and no rational in between, that's unhealthy anger.

Now, what is healthy anger look like? Healthy anger is much more closer to being annoyed. Healthy anger is. Well, you're not you're not fantasising, you're not fantasising about beating the person in an argument, but you might fantasise about. The best approach to speak to the person to resolve the conflict of the issue and when you are thinking about it, you're doing it in a calm, rational way, it's not you don't feel overwhelmed by the thoughts in your head.

You don't feel powerless to the emotion of anger. You're not scared that you're going to kick their head in the idea of being physically aggressive with the person or shouting at them. That doesn't enter your head. You're not in that territory. The thought of resolving the conflict isn't frightening or extreme. With healthy anger when you're thinking about the other person, you're able to consider things from their point of view. You're able to use empathy and put yourself in their shoes and try and try and understand at least why they might have a problem and understand the conflict.

From that point of view, you're also able to take ownership if you actually did something wrong. If part of the conflict is that you did something wrong, you're able to see it, take ownership of it. And the thought of apologising doesn't terrify you. The person with unhealthy anger, apologies and apology is not something that's going to happen, the thought of the apology increases the rage. But if you're healthily angry, the thought of going ... I fucked up I'm sorry. That doesn't feel threatening. It feels possible. Healthy anger isn't personal. It's it's about the thing that the disagreement is about. A healthily angry person, if they're in a disagreement or having an argument with someone, all they want to do is resolve the topic, an issue of that argument, and move forward and move away from it. That's what that person wants to do. The deeply angry, unhealthily angry person. They're not really interested in the actual issue.

They're more interested in hurting, the other person, the way that they hurt. They want to balance the hurt, I feel pain now you have to feel the pain, too, that's unhealthy, consuming anger. So why are the proactive things that you can do to prevent yourself working yourself into a situation where you have this unhealthy, consuming anger which can then lead to depression? Well, take a look at maybe. How are you responding to criticism or critique?

Let's just say it is your boss and you have to hand your boss some work and the boss doesn't like it. The boss is just like this isn't good enough. Maybe when the boss says that they're busy and they're rude in the way that they said this isn't good enough. How do you respond to that critique internally, do you change the words that he said in your head? or she said. If your boss is, this isn't good enough, do you walk away going?

They said, this is shit. All my work is shit. I'm shit. Who the fuck are they to call me shit? That's the start of it. The rigidity and absolutism around receiving critique. I mean, I mentioned earlier, if I'm keeping an eye on my mental health and I have to be careful about if I see people critiquing me online. If I'm in an unhealthy place and I see one person say that I don't like this thing you did.

I don't know if I see one person doing that and I'm not in a good place. I'm not able to take that critique as there's one person who doesn't like it. I then add all this weight to that person's view as if it's the absolute truth. And now the piece of work I've done is actually shit because and I ignore all the people that like it or the fact that I like it. And now one person has said, this is shit, and now I'm walking away going, yeah, it is fucking shit, this work is shit.

How dare you make me feel this upset about my work. And now I'm angry about a stranger. Now I'm angry about a stranger and I'm given a stranger an hour of my time. With anger, a fucking stranger. So how do you get out of that loop if it's your boss and your boss doesn't like the work you've done, you catch yourself in the moment. And if you you have to identify if you're feeling this, if you're feeling the anger.

Over, I rejected the report or rejected piece of work you have to write down. Where's the evidence? What are my inner thoughts? My boss thinks I'm shit, my boss things. All my work is shit, all my work is shit. And you have to go where where's the evidence? You have to challenge it. Think like a scientist. And then you go, no, the evidence is my boss doesn't like this report, but why I was my boss, rude to me when they said it, instead of searching for evidence that your boss was trying to be rude, was trying to hurt your feelings, you know, maybe they're having a bad day.

And that's why they were short with me and they weren't aware of it, and you basically challenge all the these assumptions and expose the faulty ness of them. Until your view of the triggering situation becomes more rational and you're evaluating it for what it is and you move away from the rigidity. So your boss's critique now. You're still ... If your boss was rude, you're still allowed to not like that, but you move it instead of it being most, instead of it being my boss was rude, what a fucker.

You kind of go ... I didn't like that. That wasn't nice for me that they were rude, but. That's life. Sometimes people are polite, sometimes people are rude. It's OK for me to expect that my boss speaks to me in a friendlier tone. It's OK for me to expect that and I prefer that. But I certainly don't have a fucking rule if I have a rule that my boss must at all times speak to me in a nice way. If that's my rule, then I'm going to get fucking disappointed because that's unrealistic.

That's not how humans are. And with anger, a huge theme with a lot of anger is personal the rules, right? We all have these personal rules inside us that we're not really aware of. You get them from your childhood. You get them from how you were raised. We have rules about.

How other people should treat us. We have rules about how the world should be, we have rules about how other people should behave and if our rules are incredibly rigid and are non flexible. Right. You're going to be furious because you're consistently going to be getting disappointed, but who's to say that your rules are rational? Who ... Your rules that are deeply held inside yourself, that were handed to you by parents, your school, your life experiences, you have these rules.

We all have these fucking rules that we don't question. And we are living our lives and looking at the lens of other people, too highly unrealistic rules, and if they're are very, very fucking rigid and they don't change, then life is going to be disappointing all the time. Imagine like a real common rule is other people must be polite to me. Other people should be and must be polite to me. Now, that's rigid as fuck. Other people must be polite to me.

Not all people are polite, some people are polite some of the time, and they're not polite all the time, depending on their moods. Or their relationships with people, but if you have a rule that people must be polite to you, then that sounds like a tough fucking day to me. You know what I mean, because when the rule is that rigid, you can't see things from the other person's point of view. And people are then just being rude to you all day.

But maybe they're not being rude, maybe they're being sad, maybe they're being frightened, maybe they have issues with compassion, issues with being friendly to other people, maybe that person. Grew up in an environment where aggression was valued, aggression was the language used, but now you've just personalised their entire life experience to mean this person has been rude to me. And now you're walking away fuming and the other person doesn't even or the person hasn't even tried to be rude to you.

That's just how you experienced it. But now you're fucking fuming because of another person's behaviour. They fail to meet the imaginary rule that you have in your head that other people don't know about, because that's the thing other people don't know about our personal rigid rules about how we should be treated, about how the world should be or how we should be. Other people aren't aware of them, but we treat them as an absolute truth. But when they're rigid and unmoving, they're going to get broken all the time.

We'll take that personally and we're fuming, angry all fucking day. So what do you do, and that's just one rule. What do you do with that one rule? People must be polite to me. First off, you identify the role, identify it, and you identify it by going about thinking back on your day, trying to think back of the triggers that set off your anger. What is the role? Then you ask yourself, where did the rule come from?

Now that can take you know, you might go into generally rules like that. You'd look at your your fucking parents or your teacher, someone who has a role that you must be polite was probably brought up in a household where politeness was valued and impoliteness was chastised. So if you're young enough and your dad or ma tells you, when guests come over now, you have to be polite, politeness, please and thank you. And if you don't do it, if a guest comes over with saying they've got fucking sweets and you're just three years of age, so you reach for the sweets before saying please or thank you because you're a kid and then your dad screams at you.

Please and thank you, we say please and thank you in this house, you don't just reach for the sweets, you'll internalise that because an adult is saying something and you're a child and you internalise that as a rule. I must be polite to all the people and people must be polite to me. So now that you've identified the rule and the rule is people must be polite to me, then you ask yourself in what ways is this rule or this assumption about other people unrealistic, unfair and unhelpful.

And you'd write it down and you'd go, it's unrealistic because people don't know about my personal rule. It's unfair. It's unfair because you you're failing to take into account other people's life experiences, other people's upbringings, other people's attitude towards conversation, other people's emotional boundaries, how other people are feeling that day. And you take that on board. How is it unhelpful? It's unhelpful because you're demanding things of people and they don't know that you're making these demands.

And then you go and you're writing this down. What are the negative consequences of having this rule or assumption? The negative consequences is that you're getting disappointed all day by strangers and people in your life. And you're fucking furious with them. You're really, really angry with them and it's causing real problems for you and your life and the amount of quality time you're spending in your day, because when your head is up, your fucking whole fantasising about arguments, fantasising about winning arguments, fantasising about screaming at people, you're wasting your day.

It's the biggest waste of fucking time to be in a in a cycle of angry fantasies. And then you ask .. You write it down. What is an alternative, more helpful rule or assumption?

And here's the thing. You just take out the rigidity. You don't have to be like. Go the opposite, and it's like people treat me like shit, you just instead of you take out the should and the most. So instead of saying people must be. Polite, polite to me, people have to be polite, politeness is the backbone of society. This is how you have to be. And if you're not this way, you're road to people, instead of that, you just go.

I like it when people are polite to me, I would prefer if people are polite to me. I want people to be polite to me. But, I understand that not everybody is going to be that way, and if that's the case, I might be a bit disappointed, but I'm not taking it personally. I'm not taking it personally. You know what I mean? I expect that some people will be impolite. I expect that. And I understand most importantly, that's reality.

People must be polite, isn't a fact. Some people are polite and some people are not, is a fact. People are going to be rude to you, is a fact, that's an unavoidable part of dealing with other human beings, that's unavoidable. You embrace that, you embrace that, and once that happens now you're not being sorely, gravely disappointed. You've rejected the rule. You said this rule, I learned that from my fucking parents. It's not helpful to my life.

I'm rewriting it. I'm writing a new rule. And the new rule is flexible and it's not rigid and it has empathy and compassion and it allows other people to be the way they are. They benefit, you benefit, you're a nicer person to be around and you're not see them with anger all day and then you make your little homework. The final thing you write down, what can I do to put this new rule, our assumption into practice on a daily basis?

Now you have a new fucking rule. So you're going to go into work and you're going to remind yourself before you meet every person. You know, when I walk in this morning, sometimes the security guard in work doesn't even say hello to me. So before that happens today, I'm going to say hello to him or to her, and I'm going to remind myself that I don't know what their life is like at home. I don't know what's going through their head.

But what I can do is I can take responsibility for myself. So I'm going to say I'm going to give them a lovely hello. And if they don't respond back in kind, nothing to do with me. I've done my job. It's not a personal slight on me. If they're not polite, they're probably not even thinking about me. Let them do them. I'll do me. And that's you know, you think of all the different ways in your day.

To introduce your brand new flexible role. And then what's going to happen, you're not going to get disappointed, you're not going to be seething with anger, your stress levels will be down. You'll feel a sense of accomplishment that the new rule that you've put in place is now feed, that it's feeding back to you as, wow, this is reality. Your confidence starts to grow. Your happiness grows, you become a better person to be around your own healthy levels of anger are greatly diminished and you've reduced.

Your prospects of depression, that's just one rule. And we all have different fucking rules and we're not even aware of them half the time, you know what I mean? What if you have a rule that other people can't get in the way of what you want, if you want something no one else is getting in the way of it? What people get in the way of what you want, that's life, life contains pain, chaos, disappointment and rejection, that's a fact.

You're going to be rejected. People are going to be rude to you. People are going to be mean to you. This is a given of human existence. So if your roles, personal roles, don't incorporate the givens of human existence, then existence is going to be painful and it's going to make you furious. So what I try and do, I can't go through all the rules. I ask myself all the time. Ah, my, ah, my, ah, my new rules are my rules, my rules about myself, about how I should be, my rules about how other people should treat me and my rules about the world in general.

I ask myself. Do my rules. Accurately conflate with the givens of existence. And like I said, the givens of existence, suffering and pain and rejection and rudeness, these are givens of existence. They're not pleasant. They're not nice. But pain is a part of being alive. Debt, bereavement, all these scary, frightening, bad things. These will happen. They're unavoidable. So if you have rules that don't allow for these things, then life is pain.

But if your rules are flexible enough to allow them in, then you've diminished your fucking pain. And I'm not saying avoiding pain because you will never avoid pain, pain is a given of existence, but the vast majority of pain that we experience is it's self-inflicted, walking around furiously angry all day, that's avoidable pain. So if your rules incorporate the givens of existence, the painful givens of existence, then you only ever have to feel that pain and that the unnecessary pain.

All right. That was a bit scattered at the end there, no. That was a bit scattered at the end, but I enjoyed that. I like that's cathartic for me as well, you know, to go through that, and I hope you enjoyed it. And I hope it resonated with ye and I hope I answered that fucking correctly ye, for the people who wanted me to speak about feeling angry. You know what if your rule, what if you ... You know, it's a lot of people at the moment who have a rule that the pubs need to be open, there's a lot of people who have a rule that we shouldn't be in quarantine.

Who have a rule that Christmas must go ahead. Look at all the rules that are getting broken, rules we never thought we had to consider, but they're getting fucking broken lads because life is pain. There's a pandemic. And some disappointing shit is happening, so adjust the rules around them and then you can cope. Yurt.