Camila Cabello discussed her battle with “crippling anxiety” in a candid interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1.
The 25-year-old, who recently released her new album Familia, spoke about its recording and her mental health.
Cabello told Lowe, “For a while, it was a couple months where I didn’t go back in the studio. I was just doing therapy. I was literally not functioning,” according to Just Jared.
The former Fifth Harmony member went on, “I found a therapist that everything they said really resonated with me. And part of that healing was going in the studio and being like, ‘I’m not going to do it if it’s not fun. It’s not going to be a performance.
“I can’t take it. Literally I won’t do it. It has to be something that helps me in feeling better and getting better because I can’t take this as a source of anxiety or stress. I just won’t do it.’”
She added, “What I was looking for so desperately, whether it came in the form of me in the studio or not, was connection and being seen. That’s why, for me, it was so important to be with people.
“Not forget about the music. I just was like, ‘I need to be able to trust and feel safe with the people that I’m making this music with. I need to be able to talk about these things.’”
READ MORE: Camila Cabello Addresses Fifth Harmony Breakup In New Song ‘Psychofreak’
Cabello continued, “That was something that I used to do to myself, was invalidate my own experiences. Because I would be like, ‘Oh, nobody wants to hear that from me. Why am I so anxious? Why do I have crippling anxiety? Why do I whatever?’
“My life from the outside looks great… We’re humans. What I have experienced, what Normani has experienced, what everybody experiences is so much more than what you see on the surface level, what you see my life like from the outside.
“It is so much more, actually, responsible and better for people if artists are just like the voice of the vulnerabilities and the anxieties and all of that.”
Cabello regularly discusses her anxiety with her fans, recently speaking candidly about the pressure she feels from society to put on a good show for paparazzi after a set of photographs of her wearing a bikini circulated online.
Her lengthy post included, “I reminded myself when it impacted my self-esteem that I was thinking the culture’s thoughts and not my own.
“A culture who has gotten so used to an image of what a healthy woman’s body looks like that is completely not real for a lot of women.”
