Don’t get country singer Luke Combs thinking about things, because he might have a hard time stopping.
The “Fast Car” singer says that in addition to anxiety, he has a “particularly wicked” version of obsessive-compulsive disorder. He described his “pure O” in a February interview on Australia’s version of “60 Minutes,” explaining that he focuses almost completely on the thoughts that are typically associated with OCD, rather than exhibiting any visible compulsive behaviors such as turning lights on and off, checking and rechecking locks or hand-washing excessively.
“There’s no outward manifestation of it, right? Like you were saying, the flicking of the light switch is all going on in here for me,” he said, pointing to his head. “The flicking of the light switch for someone else, you can see that going on … for someone like myself, you don’t even know what’s going on. It could be going on right now.”
According to Healthline, pure obsessional disorder is not a separate diagnosis from OCD, but the specific description does apply to many people. The compulsive part of the OCD can be mental, the website says. To manage the stress from intrusive thoughts, a person might obsessively count, visualize soothing images or simply ruminate — and ruminate some more.
“If you have a flare-up of it … you could think of it 45 seconds of every minute for weeks. It’s not fun,” the 35-year-old singer said.
Medications and talk therapy can help, per Healthline, and there are further treatments for extreme cases. And although Combs says he’s much better than he used to be, he had his worst flare-up in several years in January, just a couple of days before he headed on his Down Under tour. The difference now, he said, is he has the tools to deal with it.
“Imagine that there’s a bear in front of you, and your fight-or-flight kicks on, right? And then the bear’s gone. Well, 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. Then the more you think about it, the more bears there are, and they keep coming and keep coming,” Combs said.
“They’re never going to attack you — the bears are 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 that there’s bears over there.’ Eventually there’s less and less and less until there’s not any left.”
His “bears” can be intrusive thoughts about violence, for example, or about religion. Things that don’t have a yes-or-no answer, or any answer at all.
“It’s really questions about who you are as a person that you can’t really ever get an answer to. There’s never a yes-or-no answer, and so that’s what fuels the anxiety. … You desperately want an answer for whatever this thing that’s bothering you is.”
He’s found freedom, he says, in learning how to put those thoughts to the side and not giving them any credence.
Still, when it hits, “It can be all-consuming,” he said. Combs first experienced the intrusive thoughts when he was 12 or 13, he said, and he was “crippled” by it.
“You’re trying to accomplish something and you’re doing really great and then you have a flare-up and it just like … it ruins your whole life for six months,” he said. “And then you’re back to where you started.”
That’s why the father of two boys hopes that in his career and afterward, he can be an example to kids who are going through the same thing and show them that “great things” are still within their grasp.
“You have to know what to do,” Combs said. “I’m lucky to be an expert in how to get out of it now.”
