Country Music Superstar, 35, Opens Up About Rare Condition 14 Years After Diagnosis originally appeared on Parade.
Luke Combs recently opened up about his “Pure O” obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) — a rare condition he was first diagnosed with when he was 21 years old. The disorder is not classified as such by the American Psychiatric Association though some doctors use that terminology to describe a more specific type of OCD.
On the August 18 episode of the Armchair Expert podcast, Combs explained that he doesn’t have any “outward compulsions,” but instead, “the behaviors are all mental.”
“There’s a lot of themes that are very recurrent for people that have this. Religion is one,” he told podcast host Dax Shepard. “It essentially preys on the antithesis of who you are at your core, but it focuses on questions that are unanswerable. Which is like, ‘Do I really love God? Do I really believe in God?’ And then you spend over 90 percent of your day thinking about that. And that can happen for months on end,” Combs explained.
“It’s like a bird flying by. You just go, ‘Oh, there’s a bird,’ and then you’re like, ‘What was that bird? Why did that bird fly by?’ And then the more you wonder why the flew by, the more it starts flying by. Your brain’s like, ‘I need to send that thought again, because you’re worried about it and you being worried about it must mean something.’ Really, it doesn’t mean anything. Then the more you think about it, the more it starts showing up,” he added.
Combs shared that he’s been in therapy for years as he continues to learn to cope with the disorder.
“There’s no good parts of it other than when you don’t have it. I would say definitely the course of my life has been dictated by that at certain times,” he said on the podcast.
This isn’t the first time that Combs has talked about having “Pure O” OCD, either. In an interview with 60 Minutes Australia back in March, he said that the disorder “can be all consuming.”
“If you have a flare up of it, right, it could be you could think about it 45 seconds of every minute for weeks,” he said. “The variant that I have is particularly wicked because, you know, there’s no outward manifestation of it. So for someone like myself, you don’t even know it’s going on. It could be going on right now.”
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Country Music Superstar, 35, Opens Up About Rare Condition 14 Years After Diagnosis first appeared on Parade on Aug 18, 2025
This story was originally reported by Parade on Aug 18, 2025, where it first appeared.
