Dermot Whelan: The world is set up for busyness like never before — that's dangerous

When it comes to educating the public on the dangers of constant busyness, Dermot Whelan has certainly earned his credentials. The former breakfast radio host talks to Gemma Fullam about the road to a calmer life

Dermot Whelan: Self-compassion is one of those kind of airy-fairy terms, but I think it’s the greatest roadblock for a lot of us. Pictures: Nina Val @nvksocial. Location: Moxy, Dublin.

When Dermot Whelan tells me that 67% of men would rather electrocute themselves than sit with their own thoughts, I believe him. Probably because I’d be part of the 25% of women who’d do the same. Stand-up comedian may be one of multihyphenate Whelan’s many hats, but this is no joke. He’s quoting stats from a 2015 study at the University of Virginia in which scientists found that quietly entertaining our own thoughts is shockingly difficult for many of us.

The former Dermot & Dave Show co-host didn’t let those stark percentages throw him off his mission to bring meditation to the masses, though. Aware of the practice’s perception as “very serious” and “deep” and marketed more towards women, he came up with the genius hack of combining it with comedy to make it more palatable to all.

He seems to have hit on something with his bonkers mash-up — “like mixing MMA with flower arranging” is how he puts it — and has just concluded a three-month run of his Busy and Wrecked tour, playing to audiences that are, he says, “about 60/40 women to men”.

Women are always surprised by how many men come to his shows — albeit some are dragged along — and it thrills him that he’s reaching the guys.

“I get such a wonderful buzz when I look out into the audience and see so many men,” he says, adding that one of the things he’s asked the most is, ‘how do I get my husband into this stuff?’ Whelan freely admits his wife, the artist Corrina Earlie, “was into this stuff long before me”. He thought he was open, he says, but he wasn’t really. “I was quite cynical about it.”

He’s long since done a 180 on the cynicism and when he meets me on a sunny Friday in Dublin, his warm, calm vibe is testament to the fact that he practises what he preaches. His first book, 2023’s Mind Full, an “incense-free’ guide to meditation, was peppered with anecdotes of his journey from stressed-out to zen, and Busy and Wrecked, the book, takes up where that left off. It promises to help the busy-and-wrecked (all of us?) “create space and energy for the people and things that really matter”. Whelan says he wrote the book “I wish I could have found”.

Dermot Whelan describes his approach as 'mixing MMA with flower arranging'

For much of his career, the Limerick native could have been the poster boy for ‘busy and wrecked’ – working seven days a week for five months straight at one point; at another, doing three hours of radio in the morning, touring a live show with Dave Moore at night as well as “doing all the other things I normally do” and keeping his head above water with “disco naps” in his car. It wasn’t sustainable and he was, as the poem goes, not waving but drowning. He just needed to realise it.

The youngest of six, he’d been an anxious teen, although he hadn’t the vocabulary to identify it as that back then, as neither anxiety nor depression were part of the lexicon of 1980s Ireland.

“I had no self-awareness,” he says of his younger self. “I thought everybody felt like that. I thought everybody had a racing heart and sweated all the time. Or if they didn’t, I thought just that was… actually, I don’t even think I thought about it that deeply. I just knew I was uncomfortable at the time.” 

A self-confessed “doer”, he spent his early 20s working behind the scenes in film and TV, until getting his break on radio at 27. At 31, he began moonlighting as a stand-up comedian. Listening to Whelan list off the various hats he’s worn simultaneously throughout his career makes me feel exhausted. All the busy and wrecked-ness was bound to catch up with him. And in his 30s, it did.

On his way to perform at Kilkenny’s Cat Laughs, he had such a severe panic attack that he thought he was going to die. It took him a few more years, a drunken fall — alcohol had become a crutch; after a few drinks his “critical inner voice would get really quiet” — and a serendipitous encounter with a meditation teacher before he finally began to learn the lesson the universe was trying to impart.

He began meditating and took to it like a duck to water. “It felt very natural to me, and I was able to go quite deep very quickly. I realise that doesn’t happen for everybody.” 

He practised meditation on and off until the disco nap phase happened — “I was just in survival mode” — and he found himself crying in a GP’s office. She told him she was at breaking point too, and the realisation that running on empty wasn’t sustainable or healthy proved a catalyst for change for both of them. 

His GP went part-time and he decided to commit to what he knew worked and trained as a meditation teacher. Wasn’t that just adding more busyness, though?

“If you’re doing something that is just for you and for your self-care, it’s a little bit different. And it was at a pace, over a year, that I could work into my schedule.”

Dermot Whelan: 'I thought everybody had a racing heart and sweated all the time.'

Davidji, his teacher, appealed to Whelan because he was funny, and because meditation was “being presented in a way that didn’t seem like it was up its own arse”. Native New Yorker Davidji had reconnected to his own meditation practice — which he’d replaced with a morning commute and an evening Scotch — through what he calls “a holy moment”. 

Post 9/11, he was walking past a group of homeless people when a man grabbed his leg, looked him squarely in the eye and said: “What’s gonna be on your tombstone?” Davidji quit his corporate job, reconnected with meditation and now teaches it to millions.

Whelan studied with him, qualifying as a Masters of Wisdom and Meditation Teacher, and began teaching meditation himself, even though that hadn’t been his original intention. “I just knew that if I did teacher training, it would force me to really immerse myself and commit to this stuff that I knew helped me.” 

That commitment also eventually put him in touch with his “inner potato” — his gut instinct — which told him it was time to jump ship from the day job. Having spent 23 years on the radio, 21 of those as foil to Dave Moore on their hugely successful Today FM show, quitting seemed like madness. The ‘potato’ kept telling him to go, but logic was saying “Stay where you are”.

“I did, for the first time in my life, really listen to my gut and not try and cover over the uncomfortable feelings that I was having sitting in a radio studio,” Whelan says. “I took a pause long enough to ask myself, OK, what’s important to you? What do you want to do for the next 10 years? Are you just doing things now because this is what you-10-years-ago wanted?” 

A chat with his financial adviser helped him make the leap. 

“I thought he’d go, ‘you’re nuts. What are you doing? You’re 50 and you want to walk away from this and you’re the sole breadwinner in the home? Three kids. One starting college, none of this looks right on paper’. That’s what I was thinking he’d say. And he was the person who convinced me to do it. You should never assume that you know what people are going to say.”

Dermot Whelan: 'I did, for the first time in my life, really listen to my gut.'

He hasn’t looked back since he quit in August 2023, and since then, he’s started a podcast, Mind Full — season three kicked off on March 24 — toured his show, and written his third book. He’s busy, yes, and might still find himself feeling wrecked on occasion. But his meditation training and practice have given him a coping toolkit that’s proved a gamechanger.

“Self-awareness is something I have now, and an understanding of stress and my stress response and that it is genuinely trying to help me. Before, I would’ve either pushed back against or ignored a lot of the signs or symptoms of stress.

“I have an understanding that my natural wiring is to be hypervigilant of my surroundings. And instead of me seeing that as a negative, actually it’s a super useful tool, particularly in performance because it means I can read a room really quickly.”

He also has much more compassion for himself. Previously, his internal monologue would continually tell him “you’re terrible” and berate him for not achieving. 

“I always thought it was important to hold yourself to account. And I learned that all that is just really tiring. 

Self-compassion is one of those kind of airy-fairy terms, but I think it’s the greatest roadblock for a lot of us. 

“Wherever we go, we’re there. We might as well make friends with ourselves.”

In a full-circle moment, he says that what attracted him to Davidji is what people now tell him attracts them to his shows and books. “I do hear a lot of the time that it’s my approach that is the missing piece. That it’s the playfulness, it’s the humour. It’s the accessibility that brings them to the table.”

Whelan is a thoughtful interviewee and that rare thing: a good listener. He has a deep knowledge of his subject and is enthusiastic to share simple techniques that work, emphasising the value of creating little pockets of space in every day, even if it’s just for a single moment. 

It’s important to find the tools to deal with the busyness, he says, because while writing the book, he learned that a lot of the busyness and overwhelm and burnout people experience isn’t their fault.

“The world is set up for busyness like never before. There’s so much new science around the fact that we are constantly signalling and rewarding busyness in all our interactions because it gives us a higher social status. And science shows, the more we demonstrate that we have less time for our personal lives and the more busyness we can demonstrate, the more important we are. That’s a dangerous place to be, because our worlds will get smaller and we will get busier and busier.”

Busy and Wrecked by Dermot Whelan

We’ve talked for almost two hours and Whelan isn’t remotely watching the clock, despite the fact that he’s imminently due on a podcast. Before he has to go, I ask him for a top tip to deal with overwhelm. 

“For me, it just always comes back to space. If all you have is the length of one conscious breath, start there. If you look at the Irish rugby team, when they’re in the middle of a game, part of their huddle is one conscious breath.” 

This is news to me.

“They have to find recovery in a very challenging situation. And what they’re gonna do is they’re gonna hit that reset button, one conscious breath.” 

They actually do that?

“Yeah. They’re trying to release the overwhelm at that moment. They’re trying to bring their minds out of the past; what’s not gone their way. They’re trying to bring their minds out of the future; what could go wrong?” 

An overwhelmed mind, he tells me, will bounce between the past and the future. So that one conscious breath can create the space for recovery and a tiny, but invaluable reset.

“You’ve come out of the future. You’ve come out of the past and you’ve broken that sense of overwhelm for just that length of time. And that’s what the athletes know.” 

And with that, Whelan gives me a warm hug goodbye and heads off, leaving a trail of calmness in his wake.

• Busy and Wrecked by Dermot Whelan, published by Gill, is available now. Season three of The Mind Full Podcast is available wherever you get your podcasts.