Yahoo Lifestyle Country Star Luke Combs Reveals Battle With Rare Form of OCD
Luke Combs opened up about his experience with OCD in a new interview.
He said he recently had his “worst flare-up” in a few years.
The singer experiences “Pure O” OCD which occurs as purely mental ruminations and doesn’t manifest physically.
Country singer Luke Combs gave fans a mental health update about his ongoing experience with obsessive compulsion disorder (OCD), a condition he has dealt with since he was 12. The 35-year-old told 60 Minutes Australia that he has a “particularly wicked” version called purely obsessional OCD or “Pure O” with which he recently had his “worst flare-up” in years.
Combs gave the interview in February during a world tour and told interviewer Adam Hegarty that, at the time, he was coming out the other side of the spiral. “It’s very tedious to pull yourself out of it,” he said. But, for better or worse, he’s familiar with the experience and calls himself an “expert” equipped with the tools he needs to cope.
While some studies note that “pure O” is a misnomer, obsessive thoughts are a part of OCD. According to the National Institutes of Mental Health, OCD is a disorder marked by uncontrollable and recurring thoughts (obsessions), repetitive and excessive behaviors (compulsions), or both. Pure O is a type of OCD in which the compulsions don’t manifest externally—like the stereotypical flipping of light switches or counting of steps—they occur mentally as ruminations, intrusive thoughts, and sometimes disturbing images, according to NOCD, an organization that provides resources about the condition. Mental reviewing and reassurance-seeking are tactics often used to try and silence the thoughts, but they ultimately do the opposite and intensify them.
“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,” Combs explained. “When it hits, man, it can be all-consuming.” He added that, at their worst, the ruminations can take up “45 seconds of every minute for weeks.”
For Combs, the thoughts are often intrusively violent or attached to existential questions around religion or self-identity. In other words, they’re questions he can “never get an answer to” but “desperately” wants. And learning not to indulge the questions is how he keeps moving. “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,” he shared. “It’s weird, sucks, hate it, drives me crazy, but … the less that you worry about why you’re having the thoughts, eventually they go away.”
The singer-songwriter and father of two hopes to use his growing platform to spread awareness about the invisible mental health condition. “I definitely want to spend some time at some point in my life doing some outreach to kids that deal with this ’cause it held me back so many times in my life,” he said, “where you’re trying to accomplish something, you’re doing really great, and then you have a flare-up, and it just like ruins your whole life for six months.”
He continued: “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.”
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