Luke Combs is sharing his struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder, hoping to inspire others with the same condition.
“I do really well with it for the most part. It’s something in at least some way I think about every day,” Combs told “60 Minutes Australia” in a recent interview.
The “Fast Car” singer described his type of OCD, which is a more “obscure” form of the disorder, explaining, “It’s thoughts, essentially, that you don’t want to have… and then they cause you stress, and then you’re stressed out, and then the stress causes you to have more of the thoughts, and then you don’t understand why you’re having them, and you’re trying to get rid of them, but trying to get rid of them makes you have more of them.”
He added, “It’s really tedious to pull yourself out of it. It takes a lot of… you have to know what to do. I’m lucky to be an expert to know how to get out of it now.”
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD, is a disorder where people have uncontrollable and recurring thoughts or repetitive behaviors, or both. “Obsessions are repeated thoughts, urges, or mental images that are intrusive, unwanted, and make most people anxious,” NIMH explains.
For Combs, “the variant I have is particularly wicked because there’s no outward manifestation of it.”
Combs explained that the physical actions, or compulsions, typically associated with OCD, like repeated flicking of light switches or other repetitive behaviors, are all happening internally.
“So for someone like myself, you don’t even know it’s going on.”
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But the 35-year-old has worked to manage his symptoms as they flare up.
“The way to get out of it is, like, it doesn’t matter what the thoughts even are. You giving any credence to what the thoughts are is, like, irrelevant and only fuels you having more of them,” Combs said.
He continued, “It’s learning to just go, ‘It doesn’t even matter what the thoughts are.’ Like, I just have to accept that they’re happening and then just go, ‘Whatever, dude. It’s happening. It’s whatever.’ It’s weird, sucks, hate it, drives me crazy, but then you just eventually… the less that you worry about why you’re having the thoughts, eventually they go away.”
The thoughts range from “intrusively violent thoughts” to thoughts about religion and himself, saying “it focuses on things that don’t have an answer.”
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“That’s what fuels the anxiety is you can’t ever get an answer and you desperately want an answer for whatever this thing that’s bothering you is. But learning to [think that] it doesn’t matter what the answer is, is the freedom to just go, ‘I don’t have to have an answer to that question.’”
The OCD can flare up on stage, and “when it hits, man, it can be all-consuming.”
Combs admitted that a “really bad flare-up” can last “45 seconds of every minute for weeks.”
The “When It Rains It Pours” singer thinks he first experienced it at 12 or 13, and empathizes with kids going through similar experiences.
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“It’s held me back so many times in my life, where you’re trying to accomplish something, you’re doing really great, and then you have a flare-up and it’s like… it just ruins your whole life for six months. And you’re back to where you started.”
“I have the tools now… when it happens now, I’m not as afraid of it.”
Combs hopes to do mental health outreach to others going through OCD, hoping his work to come out of flare-ups showcases that “it’s possible to continue to live your life and be really successful and have a great family and achieve your dreams while also dealing with things that you don’t want to be dealing with. That’s something I hope people take away from me regardless of my musical success.”
