Brett Eldredge Uses Meditation to Help Overcome Anxiety

Brett Eldredge revealed last year that he had been struggling with anxiety. The singer previously said he found using a journal helped with his anxiety, but now says he found another helpful tool when his thoughts become troubling.

“I’m big into meditation now,” Eldredge said on the TODAY Show. “I’ve struggled with anxiety all my life. A lot of people never knew that. I recently started talking about that. I started getting into meditation, more working on myself, and I figured out how much we chase our millions of thoughts every day. We have hundreds of thousands of thoughts. You can either chase down those thoughts, or you can see them as they are, if you look at them a different way.

He admits that his “life has changed” since he started looking at it all in a “different way.”

The change in Eldredge is remarkable, although he might be the one who sees it the most.

“It’s still the same Brett, but in a different way,” explained Eldredge. “I learned to love myself more, and accept myself and the people around me. Not chasing down the worries and worst case scenarios and all that stuff, and really just enjoying life a lot more, doing things I love and am passionate about. [I’m] realizing you don’t have to be perfect, you can just be you, and here I am.”

Eldredge also found help in his beloved dog, Edgar, who the Illinois native credits with saving his life in more ways than one.

“I think it’s a sense of a responsibility in a good way,” Eldredge said. “I love having him around. I love getting off stage, after I’ve sang in front of thousands of people and he’s sitting there waiting for me. It’s a weird experience that’s hard to explain to people. You have this giant adrenaline — I’ve sang in front of 30,000 people and gone to an empty bus and been like, ‘What do I do now?’

“I can see my pup and go relax and know that he’s happy to see you, and everything’s good in the world. I think that’s an amazing thing to have. He’s a good bud.”

Eldredge hopes that by speaking out about his struggle with anxiety, he will prompt others to speak up about it as well.

“It became a very important thing for me,” Eldredge told PopCulture.com at a media event. “Especially when you do have anxiety and issues like that, you feel like you’re completely alone but you realize quickly that it’s one of the most human thing. Everybody deals with worries and all that stuff and so, I was like, I want to make it a passion of mine to show that, I’ve dealt with that. It’s not like I have it all the time, but we all have waves of it and different things.”

Photo Credit: Getty images/John Shearer