Stormzy has shared how he’s learned to manage his mental health as he’s entered his 30s.
Reflecting on his personal growth, the Own It hitmaker, who is Men’s Health UK’s January cover star, revealed that routine and structure have been key to improving his mental health seven years on.
He told the outlet: “I’ve learned that I thrive on structure.
“A lot of my mental health struggles before came from a lack of it. I was living in the chaos of my thoughts and the world created for me as an artist.”
The British artist, 31, has previously discussed his struggles with depression while working on his debut album, Gang Signs and Prayer, released in 2017.
Then in a 2022 appearance on Louis Theroux Interviews, Stormzy described the challenge of balancing his personal life with his career and how it affected his mental health.
“I came into music when I was 19 or 20, and I’m growing as a man,” he said at the time. “I’m also trying to figure out how to be the greatest artist.”
“(I’m) also in a relationship…and I’m also being a family man, a son, a provider and I’m also trying to provide and lead in my community, my people. It was very overwhelming and difficult to handle all of those things while I was making an album,” the Vossi Bop rapper continued.
“I would often just crash out, or get super depressed or super withdrawn or super reclusive and disappear. I would just stay at home and smoke a lot of weed.
“It was just a feeling, overwhelmingly, of ‘I actually can’t handle this’ which was also a new feeling to me because I was always a very capable child. I would break down, it was super heavy.”
In the same interview with Men’s Health UK, Stormzy revealed he was inspired by Beyoncé to focus on his fitness and nutrition in a bid to deliver “superhuman” performances.
The multi-award-winning artist is renowned for his electrifying performances, making history in 2019 as the first black solo British headliner at Glastonbury. Earlier this year, he headlined a show at Silverstone during the British F1 weekend, performing in heavy rain to a crowd of 80,000.
However, Stormzy admitted he wasn’t always in peak fitness at the beginning of his career. After watching Beyoncé’s Netflix documentary, Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé, ahead of her Coachella headline performance, he enlisted the help of a nutritionist to get in top shape.
He shared: “There’s a part in Beychella where she talks about her diet, and I was thinking, ‘Yeah, now I want a nutritionist. I want to be someone who is able to deliver a live set for 90 minutes with full energy and not stutter on my vocal, not be out of breath, not need to take a break, just be almost like a superhuman on stage, the same as I’ve seen Beyoncé.’”
The full interview with Stormzy can be read in the Jan/Feb issue of Men’s Health UK, on sale from Friday, December 20.