Sometimes the radio host and comedian turned mindfulness coach and author Dermot Whelan writes a single word into his phone diary: bench. It’s a prompt, a reminder to take some time out for himself on that day. The actual bench in question is a tatty, two-seater space between a couple of fish shops on the West Pier in Howth, Co Dublin where he lives. He’ll go there on his own or with his wife, the artist Corrina Earlie, and sit, sometimes with a coffee or sausage roll bought from a nearby van, to stare at seagulls, the occasional passing seal or boats in the harbour. “I know it sounds like something a pensioner does,” he laughs over spring rolls in The Dog House restaurant in Howth. “But that time is precious, it’s ring-fenced, it’s for me.”
The former broadcaster – until relatively recently he was one half of the Dermot and Dave radio double act, which lasted for 21 years on 98FM and Today FM – tells me about the bench by way of explaining his upcoming series of live shows. The Busy and Wrecked Tour starts in January. The show is a comic exploration of the kind of overwhelm Whelan says many are experiencing and includes some simple mindfulness techniques he hopes will help people who are struggling to find balance in their lives. It’s a show about the importance of making appointments with ourselves. About finding your own bench.
This is mindfulness, Whelan-style. It involves sausage rolls and gags. It does not involve “sitting in the lotus position on a mountain in your underwear”. He thinks the mindfulness world is too worthy. He is all about “serious transformation without being too serious”.
The father of three has a podcast called Mind Full, where he has interviewed people such as his former co-host Moore and his good friend actor Cillian Murphy about issues such as friendship and flow. His book of the same name told the story of his own path from broadcasting to wellness. There’s another book, also called Busy and Wrecked, coming out in April, but before that there’s a tour of Ireland with more than 20 shows including “the big one” at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre in Dublin on January 14th.
Why did he call it Busy and Wrecked? He had been tuning in, he says, to people’s conversations. “When you ask people how they are, it’s all ‘I’m crazy busy, I’m slammed, flat out’ and then there’s usually a gap because they realise it sounds quite unhealthy. So they tend to throw in the classic ‘but you know, good busy’.”
Whelan has become a bit obsessed by the concept of “good busy”. What does it mean? Is there a healthy amount of busy? Or is it just something we say to make ourselves feel better?
He mentions the Cooper’s Hill Cheese Rolling contest held near Gloucester, England every year. Whoever is nearest the cheese at the end wins, apparently, and it can get hectic. Whelan says YouTube videos of the contest provide a decent metaphor for his busyness theory. “At the start of that race people are really excited, they’ve still got balance, they have big smiles on their faces, they are doing what they want to do. That’s good busy, when you feel like you are still in touch with yourself. But there’s a point in that race when it changes. The expressions on the faces change. The momentum is too much to maintain and that’s when things start to feel off balance”.
The show, in a way, is about the search for “good busy”. “I think it does exist. It’s when we do things because we want to do them, not because we are avoiding the questions we should be asking ourselves. It’s about being busy but still making time for the important stuff.”
Whelan grew up as the youngest of a big family in Limerick, making home videos and sketches, the urge to entertain clearly present from the start. He was a shy and socially anxious child, but only realised this years later while trying to break into media in Dublin, having worked on film sets behind the scenes for years. Early auditions were a nightmare.
“I knew I could do it but once I got into those scenarios, the blush button turned on, I’d go red and sweat like 10 Christy Moores.”
He recalls one audition at RTÉ in particular, sitting in reception of the television centre, already overwhelmed. “I went to take a drink of water, dropped the bottle, spilt it on the floor then picked up the bottle and put my foot over the water to hide it. The woman came out, looked at me, looked down, saw the pool of water on the floor and on my trouser leg. It looked like I’d lost control of everything before I’d even gone in.”
It was always the mission of the show with Dave that we’d leave people happier than when we started. That’s still my goal; I just do it in a different way that’s more aligned with who I am now
— Dermot Whelan
When, in his late 20s, he joined the newsroom in 98FM, the fact that he was required to work on stories that were short, “felt safe”. He began to stay on, long after work hours, producing comedy sketches. He was put together with Dave Moore for the station’s new breakfast show on 98FM. They hit it off over Alan Partridge impressions and forged an on-air partnership that transferred to Today FM and only came to an end in 2023, when Whelan stepped away to make wellness his full-time job.
He’d already been moving in that direction for years. He has written about a panic attack in 2007 which led to him being brought to the Kilkenny Cat Laughs festival in an ambulance – “very showbiz, what an entrance,” he laughs. “I remember talking to other comedians that night, I expected everyone to be shocked but the other comedians were like, ‘Yeah, I have them all the time.’”
He was married with one small baby by now, living in Dublin, doing breakfast radio “which is essentially shift work” and doing comedy gigs at night. He also presented RTE’s Republic of Telly for years. “I prided myself at the time on being able to run on vapours, there was that bravado around a certain kind of lifestyle ... a confusion between stamina and resilience. I thought resilience was the ability to tough it out.”
At his busiest, Whelan remembers engaging in a lot of negative self-talk, “ ... giving out to yourself in the third person out loud. ‘Come on, you can do better than this.’ Holding yourself to account”. He likes to talk about “life soup” and says that at that time his “life soup” was “too much work, not enough rest, the pressures of a young family, more alcohol than was healthy – standard media fare.”
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He went to a psychotherapist, who told him he was exhausted. He wasn’t happy about that. He wanted a label. A phobia. He wanted to blame something from his childhood. Being told he was exhausted meant rest “and I didn’t want to hear that.” Another red flag was the time he fell down a flight of stairs at a karaoke bar, champagne glass in hand, and knocked himself out. “It was after one of those long record company lunches that don’t happen any more. I knew things had to change.”
A key turning point was being asked to MC duties for a friend’s book launch. She was also a meditation teacher and agreed to teach him some techniques in exchange for his hosting her event. Meditation made sense to Whelan immediately. His “grounded and naturally calm” wife was the first to notice that it was having a positive effect, especially around the bedtime routine with his children. “I had been rushing through it, just wanting it to be over, and she said ‘look how much more patient you are’.” Meditation made him “more present, less ratty, more patient. I started enjoying life more.”
Whelan doesn’t want to give the impression that he had one of life’s ‘aha moments’ and everything immediately fell into place. Even though he knew meditation was helping, after a time he stopped being as regular with his practice. “I was busy and distracted and the next thing you know I was talking about it a lot, telling myself I was doing it but I wasn’t really.” That’s when he ended up in his GP’s surgery crying. It was 2017. He had just moved from a lunchtime radio slot, taking over the more important midmorning gig with Dave Moore on Today FM. They were also doing their first Dermot and Dave live tour.
“I remember sitting in the doctors’ office and she asked ‘how are you’ and I burst into tears, one of those shoulder-shaking cries. I told her I was burnt out.” Interestingly, the doctor admitted to being burnt out too. He counts her as a friend now.
Crying in the GP surgery was another turning point. He began a year-long online meditation teaching course with a teacher called Davidji, in California. “He made it fun, so I was drawn to him.” The final few weeks included an intensive course in the United States. Back home, he started teaching. He remembers doing a sold-out gig for thousands with Moore in the 3Arena and realising he got a bigger buzz from teaching a meditation course a couple of days later to 30 people in an insurance company in Dublin city centre. His gut, or what he calls his “inner potato”, was speaking loud and clear. “It was like a weight in my belly, a little spud; when I listened to it I knew I had to make the change.”
Why should the guy in the high-vis vest in the digger who is ... just trying to keep it together so that he doesn’t yell at his loved ones be left out of the conversation because he doesn’t go around with a yoga mat under his arm?
— Dermot Whelan
“It was always the mission of the show with Dave that we’d leave people happier than when we started. That’s still my goal; I just do it in a different way that’s more aligned with who I am now.”
Despite the fact that mindfulness is now as mainstream as gym membership, there’s still a lot of cynicism. All this talk about being in the moment gives some people a pain in the hoop. “I get it,” says Whelan. “That’s where I was. And I am still cynical about a lot of how this stuff is presented. That’s why I try to use comedy and straightforward common sense and science. Because I don’t like the fluffiness that is built into the marketing of all of this.”
“Traditionally mindfulness and meditation and spiritual wellness is marketed at white women with disposable income. From my perspective, when I was struggling I needed more balance, I couldn’t find anything to relate to ... so that’s why I wrote my first book Mind Full.”
He says the wellness world can seem “overly well intentioned and worthy ... it’s like ‘by the way, if you are not into mindfulness then you are getting life wrong somehow. Over in this exclusive group of people who charge our crystals at midnight on a full moon, we kind of have life sorted?’”
Whelan hates that attitude. He sometimes gets pushback from other meditators who think what he is doing is not deep or spiritual enough, that it’s too flimsy. “And I say, ‘exactly’, because that’s how we get people in the door.” He’s all for people going deeper, attending Buddhist retreat centres in west Cork or Cavan – “I’ve done all of those things,” he says – but he’s more interested in providing a gateway for people who may never go that deep.
He talks about “the guy in the high vis vest in the digger, who is really struggling under the pressures of the cost of living, who is just trying to keep it together so that he doesn’t yell at his loved ones ... that guy in the digger might just need a couple of tools, some breathing exercises, why should he be left out of the conversation just because he doesn’t go around with a yoga mat under his arm?”
Whelan’s own daily routine is simple enough. He meditates in the morning and at night. He learned the handy acronym RPM, Rise Pee Meditate, from his teacher in California. He sees RPM as “setting your google maps for the day. This is the direction I’d like to move in, I may take a few detours, I may not reach there perfectly but I’ve set my intention.”
He’s deeply interested and well read in neuroscience and positive psychology, and wants to help people understand what happens in their brains when they meditate, the results that can come even for a complete beginner to meditation.
What happens to the brain after meditation? He cites a Harvard study from 2012 which showed how the amygdala, a part of the brain associated with fear and stress, shrank in a group of people who practised mindfulness meditation techniques. Whelan calls the amygdala, the “inner smoke alarm”.
What can people expect from the show? “Well, I’m blending comedy and meditation, which to a lot of people sounds strange. But the one thing I’ve learned is that humour and comedy helps people ... what I love to see at my live shows is a man sitting with a ‘you’re not going to get me’ face.”
At the start of his shows, Whelan always asks his audience whether they are there because they are looking for some kind of transformation or because they were dragged to the gig by a well-meaning friend or partner. Around half of the audience usually confesses to having been dragged there. “But when I start to tell my own story using comedy, their body language relaxes and then, when the defences are down a little bit, I can start saying ‘I know these are the things you are probably feeling; this is what is causing it; here are some things you can do so you feel a little happier, sleep a bit better, be less cranky around the people you love and be able to switch off. And the best thing is you can use these techniques whenever you want.”
He also reminds the audience that mindfulness “isn’t a cult. We don’t have to get naked and cover ourselves in hummus. I’m not going to lock the doors. It’s an incredible thing to see a thousand people who are laughing their heads off get into stillness and quiet. I feel like I am a bouncer to their own personal space. And they might never have accessed that space before.”
He doesn’t expect anyone to become a full-time meditator afterwards. “All I hope is that I open the door for them, that they connect to something they haven’t connected with before. That can be super-profound or it can just be them taking a pause from overthinking and overstressing.”
“On our deathbeds we won’t be thinking, ‘I really wish I’d put together a more complex power point’. We will be thinking, ‘how was I at the precious, private simple moments shared with the people I love the most?’ In the end, most of us just want to be nicer, more aware people.”
The Busy and Wrecked Tour runs from 2nd January to March 7th. Tickets from dermotwhelan.com or ticketmaster.ie Dermot Whelan’s podcast Mind Full is available on Spotify and other platforms
