Enter Shikari’s vocalist Rou Reynolds has opened up his struggle with anxiety in a recent in-depth interview with Kerrang! during the Youngminds takeover for Mental Health Month. He mentions that his battle with anxiety and panic attacks started around in 2015 where the Kerrang! awards were happening. Reynolds revealed that the “pressure to be a sort of entertainer, or character is tough”. It was then he recognised that he was suffering a panic attack describing it as a “weird feeling in my chest.”
He also mentioned about his struggle with getting adequate sleep after the intense panic attack: “Normally when you’re sleep-deprived it fucks with your head, your body and your metabolism. At that extreme though, any mental health problem becomes unmanageable.”
Reynolds shared that his anxiety was “totally manageable” but at the time, it was beyond his control.
“In that state, I stood no chance,” he said. “I was just a ball of anxiety. There was no logic, and I wasn’t in control of anything. But in a way it was a good thing, because I then learned a lot about myself and my head.”
In managing his anxiety, Reynolds did twelve sessions with a psychologist and shares that it “did give me a toolset to deal with it”. He did, however, find a one-hour session with the psychiatrist to be extremely helpful.
“He sat me down and questioned me and I found it really helpful. As soon as you can put something in a box, it means you can do this, this and this to combat that,” he continues.
“I think it was the reassurance of it, mostly. Him just saying, ‘You’re not going to die, you will start sleeping again and the pills will start working’ helped when I was in that full anxiety state.”
The singer has emphasised that recognising your weaknesses is the only well to get to the root of the problem when it comes to your mental health saying, “The world is all distractions, and we’re all just so busy, be it at school, or working.”
“If I was speaking to myself years ago, now, I would say, try to work out yourself more, work out where your weaknesses are and don’t be afraid to speak about them, because that’s the only way you’re going to grow as a person and learn to combat them.”
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