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Shawn Mendes is opening up more about his difficult choice to cancel his Wonder world tour in 2022, calling it both the "hardest" and the "greatest" decision he has ever made.
During Monday's (September 30) episode of On Purpose with Jay Shetty, Mendes sat down for a lengthy chat with the podcast host about dealing with anxiety and how his mental health struggles influenced him to cancel his tour two years ago, citing at the time how he "was not at all ready for how difficult touring would be" after the pandemic and that after speaking to health professionals, he needed to take time to "ground myself and come back stronger."
The "Nobody Knows" singer explained to Shetty how "anything you want to do that's extraordinary" is going to be hard and how there are "dips and peaks" along the way, but he got to a point where his "darkness" felt all-consuming.
"The problem is that, for me, the hardest part about being in a state of... I don't even know the right word to describe it, but you could say, you know, depression, you could say anxiety, you could say just general darkness or lowness. The hardest thing about that is not the feeling that way. It's that the feeling that way makes you look at your life through that lens, and therefore all the love that's around you and all the people who are loving you and supporting you, you can't even see that love anymore. It's all just kind of getting consumed by this feeling."
He continued, "I've done a lot of tours and I've been in hard places before, and I think the reality was that it just became really really clear to me that I needed to diversify in life. Since I was a kid, my entire life had been about one thing. It had been about performing and making music and just a constant kind of cycle, and it was amazing."
Mendes, who is gearing up to release his upcoming album Shawn on October 18, said that while he loved performing and making music, that cycle caught up to him and made him realized he needed to slow down to protect his peace, adding that putting "all your eggs in one basket is a dangerous way."
"I had nowhere to go when things were getting hard, and have other aspects of life that I felt connected to that I could have like leaned into to have a little bit of a like a break from touring and come back and just find that balance, and I knew there was only one way of doing that, and it was by step by step, just like creating a life," he said. "Canceling that tour was by far the hardest decision of my life and by far the greatest decision of my life. It gave me a life, it really gave me time to discover so much about myself. And yeah, I'm smiling now because it's so far away, but it did so much for me."
Elsewhere in his chat with Shetty, Mendes spoke about how being vulnerable and open to expressing emotional truths can be a powerful experience and the importance of letting go of his ego in order to find healing.
Check out more episodes of On Purpose with Jay Shetty at iHeartRadio.com.