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What’s the best piece of advice you have ever received?

It’s not really advice, but it is something my mum said when I was going through a breakup with a guy who treated me so badly our whole relationship. She said, “Oh, I feel so sorry for him.” And I was like, “Why do you feel sorry for him? That doesn’t make any sense, because I’m the one that’s been destroyed by this freak.” And she said, “Because he has to live in his head and you get to live in yours.”

I feel like it is a really good way of not holding resentment or grudges, and also not taking it personally when you’re being treated poorly. It’s the whole idea of, you can only control yourself, you can’t control others. Mum said it very casually, but it stuck with me for the past decade.

Your new live show is called Abbie Chatfield Loves Men. Who are some of your favourite men?

Adam [Hyde, her partner], my dog, my uncle, Bad Bunny, Tarang Chawla, Harrison James.

What’s the most chaotic thing that’s ever happened at one of your shows?

We do this segment called Nightmare Fuel. In Aotearoa, we had someone come up on stage and tell her worst dating story. Long, long story short: she slept with a guy who was wearing a wetsuit [during sex] – it was just rolled down to below his mid-thigh. And then after they had sex, he took off the wetsuit and had a giant scab on his shin from surfing. He peeled the scab off and ate it in front of her, post-coitus. I lay on the floor of the stage and screamed.

What do you do when you procrastinate?

Fucking doomscroll. Or I cut my cuticles really short, which is also really bad. It’s an anxiety thing.

What do you do when you can’t sleep at night?

More doomscrolling, stupidly. I’m not sure why I do that.

But I do have a subscription to National Geographic, and I keep the physical magazines next to the bed and toilet. I’ve been bad with it lately, but last night I did actually flick through that instead of going on my phone. It’s all hopeful stories about someone revegetating a specific jasmine plant, or a turtle that’s been taught how to exist in saltwater again. There was a tortoise called Jorge I became obsessed with. There was a whole five-page spread on him. It’s all just animals and people doing wonderful things.

So right now, I am mostly doomscrolling if I can’t sleep, but I’m trying to get back to my National Geographics. It has lots of fun facts to tell people as well, which makes you more interesting than when you’re on social media being like, “Oh, fucking Pauline Hanson.”

Would you rather die at the bottom of the ocean or out in space?

They would both involve a degree of suffocation, right?

You might die slowly of starvation stranded in a space station.

OK, I think space – at least the view would be nice. And it’s a new experience for me. I’ve been in the ocean before.

Without checking, what do you think your screen time is?

I think it’s minimum nine hours a day. Keep in mind it’s my work, so I’ve got to be on the stupid fucking phone editing things. But there’s also a lot of scrolling.

Now check it.

Yeah, nine hours and five minutes.

Wow, she’s accurate.

I think it’s because I get the notification every week and go “Stupid, stupid, shame, shame!” But to be fair, I never have my phone on lock. If I listen to music, it’s unlocked the whole time. So I give myself a bit of grace for that.

When was the last time you lied, and what can you tell us about it?

I went to a sound healing thing and it was really awful. It was so hideous; it gave me a near panic attack. But I told the woman running it that it was a life-changing, amazing experience: “That was so beautiful, thank you, queen.” Not her fault, I think I just wasn’t in the right headspace.

I guess it was life-changing, in that it was horrifying and made me want to vomit.

Do you believe in extraterrestrial life?

Yeah, I feel like it would be impossible for it not to exist. But I don’t believe in extraterrestrial life that has already reached Earth, because I think that if they’d reached Earth, things would be very bad for us. We’d know.