Luke Combs Offers Candid Insight Into 'Debilitating' Health Battle

Luke Combs is opening up about his lifelong battle with a "debilitating" and rare form of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

The "1, 2 Many" singer sat down for an interview with 60 Minutes Australia recently, offering a candid look at life with the "all-consuming" mental health diagnosis.

While he does "really well...for the most part" with his anxiety and OCD on the road, it's something that he says "tinges" his thoughts every day—and he even slipped into the "worst flare-up" he's had in several years while preparing to travel to the southern continent, making his first couple of weeks in Australia less than "ideal."

He explained that the form of OCD he suffers from is "more...obscure" than what people are likely to perceive the disease as.

“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 shared.

It's "very tedious" to break the cycle, even as "an expert," as he says he's become.

He also described his variant of the disorder as "particularly wicked," because there are no "outward manifestations" of it. While some who suffer from forms of OCD may be physically seen "flicking...the light switch," for example, that is exclusively going on inside Combs' mind.

"Giving any credence to what the thoughts are is irrelevant and only fuels you having more of them," he said, explaining that he just has "to accept that they’re happening."

"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,” he added.

To put it into perspective for viewers, he described, "Like, if there’s a bear in front of you…your fight or flight kicks on. And then, the bear is gone. Imagine if your brain stayed in fight or flight, and every time you thought about the bear, another bear showed up in front of you."

He continued, "The more you think about it, the more bears there are and they keep coming and keep coming and they’re never going to attack you, but you feel like they’re going to. But, if you stop thinking about the bears, and you go, ‘Oh, there’s bears over there, cool.' Big deal, doesn’t matter… Eventually, there’s less and less and less until there’s not any left."

During the sit-down, Combs explained the thoughts are "all-consuming" during “a really bad flare-up,” which he says can last as much as “45 seconds of every minute for weeks.”The thoughts "range" from "intrusively violent" to something as simple as religion, focusing on topics that he can’t answer.

"It’s really questions about who you are as a person," he said. "That’s what fuels the anxiety, is that you can’t ever get an answer and you desperately want [one]," which 60 Minutes' Adam Hegarty called “debilitating.”

Having first started experiencing symptoms around the age of 12, Combs, now 35, wants to help other kids with his variant in the future.

“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 shared.

"You don't even know what it is at that time, you're just crippled by it," he recalled, admitting that he thinks a lot about young people in the position he used to be in.

“I know I'm not going to be like this forever now…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,” he added. "I want to be an example for those kids that don't have any hope."

Next: Kelly Clarkson Wins Over Luke Combs With "Unreal" Cover of His Song