Luke Combs is discussing his mental health. While speaking on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast, the country singer revealed that he’s been dealing with Pure O OCD for years.

In Combs’ specific form of obsessive compulsive disorder, people suffer from obsessive thoughts without “outward compulsions,” he said.

“There’s a lot of themes that are very recurrent for people that have this. Religion is one,” Combs explained. “It essentially preys on the antithesis of who you are at your core, but it focuses on questions that are unanswerable. Which is like, ‘Do I really love God? Do I really believe in God?’ And then you spend over 90 percent of your day thinking about that.”

Those kind of thoughts, Combs said, “can happen for months on end.”

The thoughts don’t always have to do with unanswerable questions, though. Rather, they can also be prompted by everyday occurences.

“It’s like a bird flying by. You just go, ‘Oh, there’s a bird,’ and then you’re like, ‘What was that bird? Why did that bird fly by?’” Combs said. “And then the more you wonder why the bird flew by, the more it starts flying by.”

“Your brain’s like, ‘I need to send that thought again, because you’re worried about it and you being worried about it must mean something.’ Really, it doesn’t mean anything,” he added. “Then the more you think about it, the more it starts showing up.”

Luke Combs Discusses His Mental Health

Combs, who was diagnosed with the disorder when he was 21, said the condition has “dictated” his life at certain times. It’s a point he also made during a March interview with 60 Minutes Australia, when he called the disorder “all consuming.”

“If you have a flare up of it, it could be you could think about it 45 seconds of every minute for weeks,” he said. “The variant that I have is particularly wicked because there’s no outward manifestation of it. So for someone like myself, you don’t even know it’s going on. It could be going on right now.”

Despite the challenges Pure O OCD presents to Combs, he’s been able to have a successful life and career. That’s something he wants to show to others struggling with the disorder.

“I want to be an example for those kids who don’t have any hope,” Combs said. “You can you can still go on and do great things even though you’re dealing with something that’s really tough.”

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