“There was a time up there when nothing could touch me,” Rob Thomas, recently told Yahoo! Life. Taking a look back, the Matchbox Twenty lead singer discussed his on-stage evolution form having confidence to eventually having panic attacks.
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“I was totally fine,” Rob said of spending his 20s confidently performing in front of one crowd after the next. “When you’re young, you are just blissfully naive about everything. You’re not really thinking about how people are perceiving you, and then that starts to creep into your brain more and more as you get older, and I think you start to become way more self-conscious even than you should be.”
Once he reached his 30s, those self-conscious thoughts started to fuel panic attacks onstage. “It began in my mid-30s,” he says. “That’s when I really needed to start figuring out something to get around them, or some way to address them head-on.”
Pinpointing a particularly heartbreaking moment in his life for his struggle with anxiety, Thomas said, “Everything seemed to change a lot after I lost my mother.” He continued, “There was a sense of a huge seismic shift in the way I thought. You’re having a normal day, everything’s clicking along, and you get a phone call that changes the course of your entire future from that point on. And you realize how quickly things like that can happen. And so it feels sane to think that there’s danger lurking around every corner, or that any interaction you have might be something that skews you off into a different direction.”
At first, his strategy for dealing with the panic attacks was to “drink a lot,” Thomas admitted. “Then Xanax was my friend for a really long time,” he revealed. “But it turns out, if you’re a person who’s trying to cope with drinking too much, then Xanax is probably not the best idea for you. So I realized that it was something that I needed to be honest about with the people around me.”
He remembers being at rehearsals and lying flat on the stage, just trying to get his breath back. “The guys, at this point, are just walking over me like, ‘OK, you’ll be fine,’” he says. “And it was fine — like to be able to not be OK. It’s OK to not be OK and to let the people around know that.”
Rob credits therapy to being an integral part of his mental well-being, and noted that it’s completely normal to not find the right fit right out the gate. It might take a bit of trial and error before finding the practitioner who is the right fit. “You gotta keep going until you get it right,” Thomas said. Noting that his “first therapist, she literally fell asleep on me during the session. I had to wake her up.”
Thomas eventually found the right fit, that helped him come to the realization that he had been chronically depressed. “Luckily, I had a friend that had [a therapist] that she really, really trusted, and she turned me on to this person, and then that set me off into a really good place,” he recalls.
In addition to therapy, Thomas said he leans on his “great support system,” which includes his wife, mother-in-law, closest friends and bandmates, and also finds solace in songwriting. Check out the entire interview here.
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Audacy's I’m Listening initiative aims to encourage those who are dealing with mental health issues to understand they are not alone. If you or anyone you know is struggling with depression or anxiety, know that someone is always there. Additionally, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week at 988. Find a full list of additional resources here.