With a budding family and a chart-topping career, on the outside Luke Combs’ life looks perfect. However, the “Fast Car” singer’s has been quietly dealing with a challenging mental health condition.
During a recent appearance on 60 Minutes Australia, Luke Combs opened up about his decade over two decade long battle with purely obsessional obsessive-compulsive disorder (also known as Pure O)–a rare condition that impacts one’s inner thoughts.
“It’s thoughts, essentially, that you don’t want to have,” he told anchor Adam Hegarty. “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 revealed that he was diagnosis back when he was just 12 years old. Although he knows “how to get out of it” or the flares, he acknowledges he still has tough moments.
“When it hits, man, it can be all-consuming,” he said. “[Sometimes] a really bad flare-up can last 45 seconds of every minute for weeks. […] The way to get out of it is, like, it doesn’t matter what the thoughts even are. You’re giving any credence to what the thoughts are is, like, irrelevant and only fuels you having more of them.”
He closed by discussing how he copes with the condition, saying: “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 […] the less that you worry about why you’re having the thoughts, eventually they go away.”
Watch Luke Combs full interview with 60 Minutes Australia here.