Meghan Trainor is currently on The Four, and in recent interviews, has talked very candidly about her struggles with anxiety and depression.
Trainor first broke onto the scene with All About That Bass, a song about body positivity. While she’s maintained strong songwriting and performing career, she’s had major struggles with anxiety and depression, and had a hard time reconciling the female power she wrote in her songs, and the insecure person she was in private.
“I was the poster child of ‘I’m brave, and I love who I am, and I’m here,’” Trainor told The Sun. “And I was the opposite. I was crumbling in my bed, like, “I want to stay here and get through.’ I fell into a crazy, deep hole of depression and anxiety. When I had an episode, it would last for three days. I was crippled and had this pain.”
Trainor just co-hosted the Today show, and when Carson Daly talked about his anxiety struggles, Trainor realized she was far from alone. “He’ll never know how much his video helped my family and me,” Trainor says. “I played that for them, and I was like, ‘That’s how I was feeling. I couldn’t say it. It’s hard to explain. It’s the most confusing, frustrating thing ever because you’re just trapped in it until you can figure it out. I went up to [Carson], and I was like, ‘You don’t know what you’ve done for me, but it was amazing!’”
Like Trainor, Daly struggles with GAD, or Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and he told Today he grew up in a generation where you didn’t talk about anxiety. “’I’ve been nervous my whole life,” he said. “People think, they hear anxiety, high-pressure life, you’re on television. It’s nothing to do with that. I’ve had heightened anxiety and mild panic attacks at the playground with my own children and wife there, and the feeling was so terrifying and so gripping that I literally had to leave and excuse myself.”
Trainor’s anxiety got so bad, she wound up in the hospital. She recalled, “My throat was closing, and I was having trouble breathing. They told me, ‘This is a full-blown panic attack.’ You’re like, ‘How is my brain doing this? How does it have that much power over me?’”
Once you learn what you’re truly going through with anxiety, you can start learning how to get a grip on it. It also always helps to know you were never alone, and millions of people have it, whether they’re big music and TV stars like Trainor and Daly, or everyone else in the world working their way through life.