Luke Combs Opens up About Battle With Anxiety, OCD

Luke Combs virtually sat down with Dan Rather for The Big Interview With Dan Rather in an episode airing on Jan. 13, and a preview shows the country star discussing his struggles with anxiety and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which he says he “always struggled with.”

“It’s something that I always struggled with, always affected me,” he said, sharing that the first time he can remember being affected was in “middle school up to kind of the end of college.” “I still have my moments here and there,” Combs continued. “It’s something I’ve learned about and it’s something I’ve been able to get a hold of, so it’s been great to kind of felt free from those things for a long time now.”

The 30-year-old went on to explain that he struggles with a “unique form of OCD,” Purely Obsessional OCD, which comes on in waves and involves intrusive thoughts that Combs plays “over and over” in his head. “It’ll be something about my health,” he said. “I’ll be worried that I’m about to have a heart attack or a stroke.”

“It becomes this very obsessive thing that you literally can never have an answer to,” he continued. “That’s kind of the awful part of it… You have to teach yourself to become comfortable with the fact that you’ll never get an answer and that it is a super uncertain thing. That is what I particularly have struggled with. Sometimes that’s tough, but it’s something that you learn about yourself, and arming yourself with the knowledge of exactly what’s going on is the most important thing, I’ve found.”

Elsewhere in the interview, the “Better Together” singer, who has been breaking records for almost the entirety of his career, told Rather his rise has been “pretty crazy” since first breaking onto the scene. “Would have never imagined anything like this happening to me,” he said. “I just got lucky, I guess. Right place, right time, right songs that I happened to write and I’m just enjoying the ride so far.”

Combs recently earned an unprecedented ninth No. 1 single to start his career, and he is on track to continue to extend that record. At the CMA Awards in November, he took home the awards for Male Vocalist of the Year and Album of the Year for his sophomore effort, What You See Is What You Get.

The North Carolina native told Rather that he had been singing his entire life, but when he picked up a guitar at age 21, “that was it.” “I realized that this was kind of the thing that I felt like I was meant to do and the thing that I wanted to do,” he said.