A comedy enthusiast who struggles with anxiety has described his stand-up debut as “exposure therapy”.<\/p>\n
Adam Rogers, from Chapeltown, Sheffield, decided to step out of his comfort zone and embrace his passion for punchlines.<\/p>\n
“It was the scariest thing I’ve ever done, but was the most liberating thing I’d ever done,” he said.<\/p>\n
Rogers, 41, performed his first comedy gig in Sheffield in December 2025.<\/p>\n
He understood the irony in his performance and said he had gained a “sense of freedom” through facing his fears, despite finding it “very anxiety-inducing”.<\/p>\n
“I wanted to do things that really challenged my anxiety and pushed me out my comfort zone,” he said.<\/p>\n
“It’s amazing how long five minutes feels when you’re in front of 200 people,” he added.<\/p>\n
He has now performed 11 times across comedy clubs and open mic nights.<\/p>\n
Rogers was diagnosed with general anxiety disorder in 2019, but it was as he faced a milestone birthday in 2025 that he felt motivated to tackle his condition and change his life.<\/p>\n
“The realisation that I was going to hit 40 kicked in and so I created a bucket list of things that I wished I’d done at a younger age but hadn’t,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A comedy enthusiast who struggles with anxiety has described his stand-up debut as “exposure therapy”. Adam Rogers, from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":851835,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[49,48,84,393,394],"class_list":["post-851834","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mental-health","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-health","tag-mental-health","tag-mentalhealth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/851834","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=851834"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/851834\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/851835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=851834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=851834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=851834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}