Ashley Roberts: If you don’t scream your body will! Anxiety, insomnia, and Pussycat Dolls' comeback
6/8/202659 min
For Ashley Roberts, dance was her self-expression and meditation. Then, at the height of her Pussycat Dolls fame the art she loved became tangled up in extreme burnout and body shaming.
In this chat with Fearne, Ashley explains how discovering breathwork brought her back to herself after a period of intense anxiety and physical ill-health. Now, the Pussycat Dolls are making a comeback in their 40s, and this time round they’re doing it with a bigger focus on having more fun and giving fewer f*cks.
There’s a lot of mental illness in her family, so Ashley talks about the mental health toolkit she’s creating for herself, as well as the grief of losing her dad to suicide. Plus, she and Fearne both suffer from insomnia, so share what works – and what really doesn’t – for each of them.
The Pussycat Dolls will be touring Europe in summer 2026.
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsFearne Cotton· Host0:00
[gentle music] Hello, and welcome to Happy Place with me, Fern Cotton. This is the show that helps create your personalized mental health toolkit. Today I'm chatting to Ashley Roberts.
Ashley Roberts· Guest0:10
I've got a heavy lineage of extreme, you know, mental illness and people struggling. So it was super important for me also to make sure within myself that I felt like I could have some tools that make me feel stable. I, I do feel like we s- have habitual patterns on the way that we think and cycles that we go through within our mind. And when I do s- some of these breathwork practices, I have a way of thinking that is more joyous, more possibility. And the more I'm in that state then, like, my reality's starting to shift. My foundation for stress is becoming stronger.
Fearne Cotton· Host0:47
What are you up to lovely people? How are you? Now, I am late to the party with a lot of things. Sometimes when something's like very zeitgeisty I think, I can't be arsed. So it has taken me months to finally get around to watching Wuthering Heights. Now, this has no connection to this podcast episode whatsoever, but I need to give this airtime because if you haven't seen Wuthering Heights, like I hadn't, what are you doing? The ... I cannot tell you how much this film impacted me. I loved every millisecond of it. First of all, it is just beautiful to watch. The costumes, the sets, the way that Emerald Fennell, who directed it, has created these