Luke Combs Sat Down With 60 Minutes Australia For An Honest Interview
During an interview with 60 Minutes Australia, Luke Combs shared intimate details about his life. The “Beautiful Crazy” singer talked about his rapid rise to fame, family life, and his battles with the mental health disorder OCD.

During the interview, he mentioned that his hit song “Hurricane” was pivotal to his rise to stardom. Country Rebel recorded his hit single live seven years ago. Watch the performance below.

What Is OCD?

According to the American Psychiatric Association, Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) “is a disorder in which people have obsessions, which are recurring, unwanted and unpleasant thoughts, ideas, urges, or images.”

OCD is a widely misunderstood mental health disorder that varies in the way it presents in each individual. During Luke Combs’ interview with 60 Minutes Australia, he made it clear that his “version” or rather experience with OCD is “more…obscure.”

Luke Combs Explains His Battle With Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

When asked by the reporter to elaborate on his experience, he shared what OCD was like for him, saying,

“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.”

To further clarify the disorder, he shared the following analogy:

“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.”

The reporter remained curious about the topic and continued to ask the singer about his intrusive thoughts, wanting to hear exactly what they were.

At first, Combs politely refused to answer the question, stating that the “thoughts are irrelevant” and that discussing them can just cause him to have more.

The reporter continued to ask about the detailed thoughts throughout the interview, and eventually, Combs gave in and shared that the thought can be “intrusively violent” or revolving around religion, for example.

The singer then went on to say that he wants to do some sort of outreach for the disorder. Specifically for kids who are unsure of what is happening. He shared that his OCD manifested when he was around “12 or 13 years old” and that, at the time, he was “just crippled by it.”  

He ended his discussion around OCD with a hopeful note saying that,

“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.”

Watch his full interview below.