Steve Garrigan has opened up about his experiences with anxiety and panic attacks and insists that "there's strength in vulnerability".
The Kodaline front man was on The Late Late Show on Friday, on the back of his newly-released book High Hopes: Making music, Losing My Way, Learning to Live.
As Ryan Tubridy pointed out, you wouldn’t associate shyness and panic attacks with someone who sings and performs in front of thousands as a member of a hugely popular group.
But then Steve recalled his first encounter with anxiety and panic attacks, when he was 20 and in Dublin’s city centre on an otherwise ordinary trip to town.
"I had never heard the word anxiety before in my entire life," he recalled. "I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t know what it was. And I had never heard the words panic attack either.
"But I was walking around town with an old girlfriend at the time . . . and then all of a sudden, something came over me. I freaked out and I went up to the bathroom, trying to calm myself down."
But instead of calming down, he just felt worse. "I thought I was going to die," he admitted.
He eventually got a doctor, who calmed him down, explaining that he was suffering a panic attack. "That was my first introduction to anxiety."
A few days late he still felt far from good, but he kept his condition a secret.
"I kind of just bottled it up" he recalled, as he feared how his friends or family might react. "I felt like I was a bit broken, and I didn’t want them to know that. I didn’t want them to treat me differently."
His only outlet was music. "That helped a lot," he told Ryan Tubridy. "I saw music as my therapy. But I learned now that therapy is going to therapy." And writing the book was clearly a form of therapy too.
"I’m in a much better place now, but the whole point, the whole reason behind the book was to speak about my experience with anxiety and panic attacks, and just reduce the stigma a bit," he explained.
"There’s a lot of people out there, particularly Irish men, who are just going to suck it up and they’re like: I’ll be grand."
He added: "There’s strength in vulnerability" and that bottling things up is not the way to go. "It’s good to talk about it."
