Luke Combs Opens Up About Living with Pure O
With a budding family and a chart-topping career, Luke Combs’ life appears perfect from the outside. However, the ‘Fast Car’ singer has been quietly managing a challenging mental health condition.
During a recent interview on 60 Minutes Australia, he shed light on his battle with purely obsessional obsessive-compulsive disorder (commonly known as Pure O), a rare condition that affects a person’s inner thoughts.
‘It’s thoughts, essentially, that you don’t want to have,’ he explained to 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.’ This cycle can make it difficult for individuals to understand the source of their anxiety, further complicating their mental health journey.
Combs was diagnosed with this condition at the young age of 12. While he has learned coping methods, he admits that difficult moments still arise. ‘When it hits, man, it can be all-consuming,’ he said, recalling times when a bad flare-up could last ’45 seconds of every minute for weeks.’
He emphasized that the key to managing these thoughts lies in understanding their transient nature. ‘It doesn’t matter what the thoughts even are,’ Combs noted. ‘The less that you worry about why you’re having the thoughts, eventually they go away.’
For those interested, the full interview can be viewed here.
