Sara Pascoe says becoming a mother has made her a better stand-up.

The comedian says that giving birth to Theodore, three next month, and 15-month-old Albie eroded the distinction between between her on- and off-stage personas.

And she says it has had a positive effect on her mental health as she no longer experiences the same adrenaline highs and crashing lows from being on stage.

Speaking to Kirsty Young on her Radio 4 show Young Again this morning, Pascoe said: ‘Before having children, I would have said there's a performance skin or a mask that clicks: you hear your name [announced on stage] and something happens to your body and you're a different version of yourself.

‘For some reason, having a child, it just disappeared… I wondered if it was because I was doing stand-up with a baby at home, especially if I was breastfeeding still, that it was the attachment that let me forget. 

‘Being on stage, there has always been a "click": you're just focused on what's going on. Comics love it because if you're having a bad time, on stage is the most exhilarating… you’re just dealing with what's going on, everything else is left away. There's a such a relief to it.’

But she said that going on stage three or four months after giving birth ‘my body just wouldn't do it for me anymore… [I was[ feeling very much like a postpartum woman and feeling like a mum and feeling there was no click, so I was focusing. 

‘Now I'm staying exactly the same on stage [as off]. I've had to accept that there's no click, but that there's a performance version of me. Now I think all of me is off-stage and then all of that is taken on stage with me. I think I'm better. 

‘I also think it's healthier because I think what happens when you have a click is you can have a crash afterwards. Your body can be flooded with things, which is the focus, the adrenaline, and then there's the gradual disintegration of those over the evening, or the travel home ,or the hotel room. And like lots of performers, I would go."Oh yeah, I’m feeling very grey".

‘What happened on my last tour when I was pregnant with my baby at home was that I stopped getting crashes because there was no "up" so there was no "down". Adjusting to that, I think. I'm better at work. But I'm also better mentally, emotionally.’

However in the in-deptg interview she also spoke about how her self-esteem was ‘destroyed’ when she became a mum, and about how difficult it was maintaining a self-employed career.

She said she had spent ’20 years working really, really hard to a point where I felt like I was achieving the things I had wanted to achieve and I was just enjoying my professional life so much. And then the children took all of it away. 

‘Autonomy made my job really hard. Filming for 13 hours. Stand-up meant leaving at bathtime. Or maybe putting them to bed, but then literally exhausting yourself, because then you come back and do all the night stuff [after retuning from a gig].’

The premise of Young’s show is that her guests give advice to their younger selves, and 42-year-old Pascoe said the one tip she would herself as a fledgling stand-up would be not to drink before a gig.

She said: ‘I did drink for ages, I was searching for that moment where the first drink hits and you just get that little burst. I was trying to escape nerves. 

‘So my advice to myself would be the nerves are good for you. You should feel a bit worried. It matters. And trying to numb that feeling was the wrong direction for me.

‘It meant I wasn't in control of a lot of how my gigs went. If the audience were very receptive, I would have this wonderful time. If they weren't, I didn't have a toolkit. Your brain needs to be sober [but] you're sluggish.  And actually, if it's not going well, you shouldn't have a buffer. You should know it's not going well, so you can make it better.’

She said her boyfriend at the time, fellow comic John Robins, was the one who suggested she stop taking a drink on stage, telling her: ‘You’re not focused because you keep looking at your drink for a gap where you can drink it.’

‘It was true,’ Pascoe admitted. ‘I stopped, and then it felt like starting stand-up all over again, really feeling the nerves, but I started really connecting to what I was saying .

‘Actually I sped up as well because I wasn't looking for gaps to sip. Even an hour show at Edinburgh, I don't even take water on with me now. You don't really need a drink, you need air. And so my rhythm’s better.’

The comic also said she never really worried about telling audience secrets about her life as ‘I'm an overshare. I like oversharing. It doesn't feel exposing. It feels like showing off, and it feels like a connection when I do it in stand-up.’

She said nothing was off-limits as the embarrassing moments in life are ‘where the interesting stuff is’, that in sum situations he first thought was ‘I hope no one ever finds out about this’ and her second is ‘I'm going to talk about it’ on stage. ‘It's such a wonderful thing to do with shame,’ she explained: ‘You go, "I'm going to explode it all".

However she admitted that she had sometimes said things in her comedy that upset her parents and her two sisters – even though she conflates both siblings into a single person on stage ‘so they both have deniability’. So now she is more careful to check.

Pascoe added that she was also tempted to give her younger self the careers advice to be more patient and ‘wait until you're a bit better before doing some of the things that are quite public or exposing’.

Her example was going on Live At The Apollo just four years into her career, alongside more experienced comedians more used to playing 3,000 people.

But while the temptation would be to advise a young comic to be patient, she added: ‘I'm not going to give that advice because doing these things and knowing you're not quite good enough is such a spur to improve, and it's part of the experience. You need to be better the next time that you do it.’

» Young Again is available on BBC Sounds.