RUBY Wax reckons we are not equipped for this century.

“It’s too hard, too fast, and too full of fear; we just don’t have the bandwidth,” says the American comedian, writer and mental health campaigner, whose new show, Sane New World: The Tour, will play the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, on September 14 and Harrogate Theatre on October 13.

“Our brains can’t take so much information in a world where we’re bombarded by bad news and force-fed information.

“I can just about take in the weather, then I’m exhausted. You open a newspaper, everyone’s dead. We’re only supposed to know what our neighbour is up to; if the woman next door to you is having sex with the man next door to her we need to know; but four doors down and it’s none of our business,” Ruby reckons.

Based on her chart-topping book of last year, Sane New World: Taming The Mind, Ruby’s one-woman show aims to “help us understand why we sabotage our own sanity”, while also providing a guide on how to survive the 21st century. Here is where Ruby’s knowledge, gained from her Masters Degree in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy at Oxford University, will be put to comic use.

Ruby will give a tour of the brain and how to tame it with the aid of her mental manual. “We know so much about how the world works but so little about our how our own minds work,” she says. “ It’s like having a Ferrari on top of your head but no-one gave you the keys.”

Ruby arrived in Britain from the United States in 1977, beginning her acting career with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

She has since written and performed in her own television programmes for the BBC and Channel 4 and was script editor on each series of Absolutely Fabulous. In the wake of her masters degree, she has become a respected campaigner on mental illness issues.

Tickets for Leeds can be booked on 0113 213 7700 or at wyp.org.uk; Harrogate, 01423 502116 or at harrogatetheatre.co.uk