The singer has opened up about mental health.
All may have seemed good on the outside, but Liam Payne has revealed that the One Direction years were the lowest point for him.
Speaking on The Diary of a CEO podcast, Liam opened up about his struggles with fame, drugs and alcohol during the height of the One Direction years.
He said: “I was worried how far my rock bottom was going to be. Where’s rock bottom for me? And you would never have seen it. I’m very good at hiding it. No one would ever have seen it.”
Explaining how bad things had gotten, Liam revealed that at one point, there were moments of “suicidal ideation.”
He continued: “There is some stuff that I have definitely never, never spoken about. It was really, really, really severe. It was a problem. And it was only until I saw myself after that I was like ‘Right, I need to fix myself.'”
“There were a few pictures of me on a boat and I was all bloated out. I call it my pills-and-booze face. My face was just like 10 times more than it is now. I just didn’t like myself very much and then I made a change.”
He pins his low points to starting in the industry so young, being put in One Direction at only 16, and shot to worldwide fame.
He also said that there were often times he and his bandmates wouldn’t be allowed to leave their hotel rooms, so he would turn to alcohol.
“So, at a certain point, I just thought ‘Well, I’m going to have a party for one,’ and that just seemed to carry on throughout many years of my life. And then you look back at how long you’ve been drinking and it’s ‘Jesus Christ, that’s a long time,’ even for someone who was as young as I was. It was wild but it was the only way you could get the frustration out in the day.”
“As a teen, the one thing you need is freedom to make choices and freedom to do stuff. We were always locked into a room at night. And then it would be car, hotel room, stage, sing, f-ed. So, it was like they pulled the dust cloth off, let us out for a minute to go ‘Woohoo’ then it’s like ‘Get back underneath here!'”
He also added that he went back to this stage last year when the first lockdown hit, saying he found himself drinking earlier and earlier, and knowing he could hide it better on Zoom interviews rather than in person.
But it all changed again and Liam has been making huge differences in his lifestyle, not to mention he’s got he support of a fellow 1D member.
He said: “I had a lovely phone call from Harry the other day. He was checking in on me. It’s almost as if some people have got a sixth sense about when you’re going through something and want to check in.”
