Luke Combs is “mentally exhausted” amid his battle with Pure O OCD. During an appearance on the On Purpose with Jay Shetty podcast, Combs shared more about his mental health condition.
Combs previously revealed that, with his form of OCD, he experiences obsessives thoughts without outward compulsions. In his new interview, Combs said those thoughts occur during “about 95 percent of the day.”
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“From opening your eyes to closing them at night, you’re thinking about this thing, and it’s causing you a tremendous amount of anxiety and mental anguish to try and find the answer to this unanswerable question,” he said. “It’s scary.”
For Combs, the thoughts are “theme-based,” which means he hyper-fixates on one topic at a time.
“Let’s say I was having intrusive thoughts about committing violence against someone or something, and they’re causing me all this stress, and I’m like, ‘What does that mean about me? What does that say about me?’” he explained. “And then if my theme were to switch the next day, I’m like, ‘What if I was a schizophrenic and I didn’t know it?’ And you’re completely panicked, and you’re all consumed by that.”
Luke Combs Opens Up About OCD Battle
The thoughts, Combs said, can vanish “in an instant,” and then he’s left feeling “so stupid” for having them in the first place.
“Why did I waste three months of my life stressing about that thing? But when you’re in it, you don’t have the capability to turn it off,” he said. “Your brain’s just constantly bombarding you with these life-or-death feelings of, ‘You need to address this issue. It’s a big issue and it has to be addressed right now.’”
“You’re almost in fight or flight mode all the time, and it’s just exhausting,” Combs added. “You get so mentally exhausted having this battle with yourself.”
After years of dealing with his conditions, Combs said he now has the tools to “combat” his thoughts.
“I know what bad is. I’ve been to the bottom in [my head],” Combs said. “I’m not there. I still have the proclivity to go there if certain things line up and I were to have an OCD moment. But those moments are few and far between, and they’re a lot shorter-lived than they used to be. And I’m not afraid of those moments anymore.”
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