A female honeybee larva can grow up to be either a queen or a worker depending on what food it's fed. I didn't make that up. Hives are complex social structures with different kinds of workers, such as harvesters, nurses and cleaners. There are no hedge fund bees or celebrity bees. Everyone gets fed, there is no competition, everyone is equal, they know their place, the cleaner wouldn't dream of being a nurse bee.

Unlike us. We feel we need to do it all: (Attention women!) be the queen; lay the eggs; clean; work; cook; breed ;make cupcakes. This is why we end up on xanax and bees don't.

It's that old chestnut. Comparison is what drives us mad. When will I learn I am not you? I don't even have the same shaped nose, why would I need to have what you have? Some people are satisfied with their lot. I haven't met anyone like this but I know they're out there in the country somewhere among the trees growing their own chickens, pulling udders for a living.

For the rest of us there's an infection in the air, there are memes like mental viruses that travel through the atmosphere spreading ideas from mind to mind influencing our thoughts and behaviours. You don't even have to watch the news or listen to gossip. It will permeate into your brain, whether you like it or not. Part of the infection is not just keeping up with your neighbor but leaving that neighbour in the dust seething with resentment. We strive, we strive and we strive some more.

Maybe, we think if we stuff ourselves with enough information it will raise us above the hordes, that the more RAMs we've rammed in our heads the more significant our presence is on earth. We take in all that information at a cost; it exhausts us trying to figure out what we need and what is trivia. We're so clogged up upstairs it's difficult to make sensible decisions; should I worry about cancer or getting the right toothpaste?

Our brains are not computers, they don't need charging, they need to rest and there is no rest. Who has time to rest? It's a dirty word. The only time you can legitimately rest is when you're in the rest room and then you're forgiven, otherwise if you say you're resting, you're fired or seen as old and senile. Every bit of information coming in and out is sucking out your energy, that's why you always forget where you parked your car.

And let me just bring in mental illness. One of the first symptoms of depression is when you can't make any decisions. Choosing which direction to walk is overwhelming, looking at a menu is like going on Mastermind. Eventually your brain gives up, it has no more room, you've scored 'game over' hit your full capacity like an over stuffed hoover bag before it explodes. Then, the agony of people demanding an answer becomes too much to bear and finally you can only decide which window you want to jump out of.

Something has to change - can it change? Can we change?

I'm in the early foothills of Mount Everest as far as writing my next book. Hard? Don't make me laugh. This next book (still with humour) is about mindfulness since that happens to be the 'it' girl these days. Who knew when I studied mindfulness at Oxford it would become so popular? But it's still hard. I could have written a cookbook and stayed on the bestseller list for years. I could have just plagiarised from any popular cookbook, copied a few recipes, jumbled up the order of ingredients and use the instruction 'pummel' instead of whip and I'd have a hit with a photo of me on the front cover licking a spoon. Or I could have written another 87 Shades of Greywhere I'd simply use 'whip' instead of 'pummel'. I'd probably have to do some personal research on the topic since I've never used a noose during sex.

So back to the question. Why mindfulness? I've mentioned a lot that I had a mental car crash seven years ago. I said, to quote Scarlett O'Hara (sort of), "I will never go crazy again". And so I've kept my promise to myself and haven't had an episode of depression for seven years. This doesn't mean I still don't have a daily frenzy of answering all inbox emails in one jaw clenching sitting - even answering spam asking if I want to purchase a special stool for the shower in case I can't stand up anymore. I also have my regular obsessive shopping mania for things I will never need but they're on sale; a gazebo with 30% off - you just can't pass that up. Even if I don't have a garden.

But aside from that, no depression. I don't mean a 'down-in-the dumps-boo-hoo-bad-hair-day' slump. It could be coincidence but what's changed is that I've been practising mindfulness for the last seven years. After the last trip to Hell, I researched to find anything that could alleviate my madness take the pain away. Please don't think I'm pushing some miracle cure like crawling to Lourdes to smooch Our Lady's feet. All I can say is I haven't had depression for seven years. Mindfulness works for me.

I just got back from TEDTalks, which were held in Rio this year. It's like going to Glastonbury but the acts are geniuses who've invented things I've never dreamt possible. It's extraordinary - and the sense of "I'm not worthy" bubbles below my surface as I'm surrounded by all this brain candy.

The biggest thrill of all thrills is hanging out with some of them during the breaks. I lost weight from all the mingling with women who are standing up to the Taliban even though their lives may be substantially shortened, high techies who make apps that teach kids to read, saviours of the environment and preventers of death and illnesses; not in that order. Here, instead of treating you like some pathetic prehistoric fish, they give you their cards, yes, like you're going to be friends from now on. I am now back in the UK touring Sane New World with no voice from all the talking. I now bark at the audiences and do a lot of mime.

I can't even list all the jaw-droppers I met at TED. Over breakfast, a woman told me she makes satellites and floats them over Egypt to look for archeological sites; she's found over 17 pyramids. I met two young, gorgeous girls researching at Princeton; one is an astrophysicist, her job is to find life on other planets. Her friend, with a ring in her nose and wearing a black sparkly dress, is a cosmologist (I thought that meant she did make-up) who's an expert on what happened 1,000 nanoseconds after the big bang. They said they had a hard time getting dates when they tell men what they do. The men just walk away in mid-sentence they're so intimidated. It goes on and on.

There was a kid from Singularity University who invented some app where after you get a genetic blood to test your proto DNA, you hold the iPhone up to some cloud and find out if you have the beginnings of cancer in a specific area in your body. There was another guy who put helmets on monkeys so they can read each other's minds. One of the monkeys sends the message through the helmet to move the arm of the other monkey. He's starting to try it on humans - meaning one day you could pass your thoughts on through sheer force of will. Are you getting the idea? They put a suit with sensors on a kid who had spinal damage and couldn't walk. The activated suit got him up out of the wheelchair at the Brazilian World Cup and he kicked a football which he could feel on his foot from other sensors. Everyone at the game wept.

When they asked me what I did I just coughed over the part about being in comedy, though the Dalai Lama's right hand man asked if I could help him do stand up for the next TED conference. We're going to Skype and I hope to have him getting laughs by the end of the month. At one point I couldn't even get my iPhone to work so stopped some passing guy and said, "You look like a techie, can you help me get my phone working?". When I say he looked at me like I was a rotting corpse, it doesn't even begin to describe it. I read his badge. It said 'Director of Amazon'. I winced for an hour trying to unclench my behind. Some people might cower in a corner, but for some obsessive reason I had to know what everyone did for a living. My curiosity is almost an illness, and I now have so many business cards I don't even know who they belong to.

Listening to these people I'm not frightened about the future. We are in good hands, they care, they're doing something about the problems - from stopping the ice melting to bringing back the Amazonian trees, and they're doing it in spite of governments. There are brave souls everywhere in the world fighting for their rights even though their lives are in danger. I was lucky enough to see up close these heroes of tomorrow.

Here's another fly in the ointment; choice. When I came to the UK I would have killed for ice cream that wasn't chocolate or vanilla. Then my country started to make 31 flavours. Then 1,310 flavours. It started slowly, strawberry, mint bubble gum, bacon with egg, alfalfa, no calories, no fat, no sugar, no ice cream. It can make you crazy now. Choice is ruining our lives, taking up precious moments. 99% of our lives are taken up by deciding. Supermarkets had 1000 products for the last generation to choose from, and now there are 40,000 of them. We need to ignore 39,850 items. We suffer from decision overload, we have a limit and then we hit neural fatigue.

Zillions of bits of information downloading through computers with more processing power than Apollo mission control are coursing up to your brain through your fingertips. In 2011 Americans took in five times as much information everyday compared to 1986. This is the equivalent of 175 newspapers.

Just to communicate with friends, not counting work, each of us produce on average 100,000 words every day. In there world there are 21, 274 TV stations that produce 85,000 hours of original programming every day - people watch on average of five hours of TV each day. This doesn't even include youtube, to which 6,000 hours of video uploaded every hour. Each of us has over half a million books stored on our computers, not to mention information in our cell phones and the stripe on back of credit cards. We have a world with information with data figures that run in the region of three with 20 zeros behind it. We take in all that information at a cost; it exhausts us trying to figure out what we need and what is trivial.

We're so clogged up upstairs it's difficult to make sensible decisions; should I worry about cancer or getting the right toothpaste? Our brains are not computers, they don't need charging, they need to rest and there is no rest. Who has time to rest? It's a dirty word. You say you're resting, but the only time it's acceptable is when you go to the rest room and then you're forgiven. Otherwise you're fired or seen as someone old and senile. Every tweet, Facebook entry,and text is sucking out your energy that's why you forget where you parked your car. How can we manage in a world that is bombarding us with information? I'm really asking - do you know?

I'm on the road this autumn talking about mindfulness in a busy world - hope to see you there.