Country star Luke Combs opens up about obscure mental health disorder: All-consuming

Luke Combs is sharing his struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder, hoping to inspire others with the same condition.“I do really well with it for the most part.It’s something in at least some way I think about every day,” Combs told “60 Minutes Australia” in a recent interview.The “Fast Car” singer described his type of OCD, which is a more “obscure” form of the disorder, explaining, “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.”He added, “It’s really tedious to pull yourself out of it.

It takes a lot of… you have to know what to do.I’m lucky to be an expert to know how to get out of it now.”According to the National Institute of Mental Health, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD, is a disorder where people have uncontrollable and recurring thoughts or repetitive behaviors, or both.

“Obsessions are repeated thoughts, urges, or mental images that are intrusive, unwanted, and make most people anxious,” NIMH explains.For Combs, “the variant I have is particularly wicked because there’s no outward manifestation of it.”Combs explained that the physical actions, or compulsions, typically associated with OCD, like repeated flicking of light switches or other repetitive behaviors, are all happening internally.“So for someone like myself, you don’t even know it’s going on.”But the 35-year-old has worked to manage his symptoms as they flare up. “The way to get out of it is, like, it doesn’t matter what the thoughts even are.You giving any credence to what the thoughts are is, like, irrelevant and only fuels you having more of them,” Combs said.He continued, “It’s learning to just go, ‘It doesn’t even m...