The Comedian's Guide to Mental Health: Handling Highs and Lows

When you're starting out, you'll feel the rush of a good set and the low of a bad one more intensely than almost anything else in your life. It's incredibly easy to let those swings take the wheel and run your emotions for days.

The goal is to get to a place where you can compartmentalize every performance, good or bad. After a great set, sure, enjoy it, but don't let it convince you you're the hottest comedian on earth. After a bad one, you acknowledge it was bad, but you remind yourself that you're better than that and you simply have to be better next time. Staying on that even keel, refusing to ride too high or sink too low off any single set, is what keeps you sane over the long haul.

The hardest thing to do in comedy is to separate your self-worth from the number of laughs you got. It is incredibly easy to let a "bad" mic convince you that you are a failure as a human being.

It helps to think of open mics as the gym. You don't go to the gym and get upset because the weights were heavy. You went there to work. A set where no one laughs but you learned that a specific premise doesn't work is actually a successful set. It's data. Don't let the data dictate your happiness.

This is exactly why it's so important to get on stage as much as you possibly can: the volume is what lets you power through the bad stretches. No single rough night carries much weight when it's one of hundreds. And every time you get on stage, you should be learning something, whether it's a tag that works, a premise that doesn't, or just how a room feels. If you walk off stage having learned nothing, you're doing it wrong.

Comedy can be incredibly isolating. You spend all day in your own head writing, and then you go to a club where you're competing for time. But the "hang" after the show is just as important for your health as the set itself.

Find your people. You need friends who understand what it's like to bomb in front of four people and a bartender. Every comedian knows that exact feeling, so there's real relief in being around people who get it. Having a community to vent to, to bounce ideas off of, and to just commiserate with makes the low points much more bearable.

There's a practical upside, too. Sometimes you'll find that other comics felt the same way about a particular crowd, and you'll realize it wasn't so much you being bad as the room being off that night. That said, nobody likes the person who always blames the audience and is relentlessly negative, and honestly, if you're calibrated right, you shouldn't be bombing often enough for that to be your whole personality. The other trap to watch for is comparison: it's hard not to measure yourself against your peers and feel like you should be doing everything they're doing. Use the hang to learn from them, not to beat yourself up.

There is a toxic idea in comedy that you have to be at a mic every single night or you're "quitting." Plenty of great comics burn out and disappear because they never learned how to take a week off. Early on, I'd go long stretches between sets, long enough that a rough one had time to really sit with me, and yet the urge to get back on stage always came back. Stepping away is not the same as quitting.

If the thought of going to a mic makes you feel genuinely miserable, don't go. Take a week. Go see a movie. Talk to people who aren't comedians. It's cool to do four open mics in a day, but that pace wears you down really fast, and burnout helps no one.

Time away from comedy is what feeds the comedy. Your best material comes from the rest of your life, so if you're doing comedy 24/7 you'll end up writing jokes about comedy instead of the more interesting parts of being a person. I usually take a few week-long breaks throughout the year, often when I go on vacation somewhere, and almost every time I come back refreshed, with more to say and ready to go.