'It devastated me': Adele opens up on struggle with anxiety and depression after divorce

The singer at an NBA basketball game last month. Credit: AP

Adele has opened up about her mental health struggles, detailing how anxiety and depression left her bed bound following the breakdown of her marriage.

The Grammy Award-winning singer, 33, told how she felt “devastated and embarrassed” when news about her divorce to Simon Konecki emerged in 2019.

Adele told Rolling Stone magazine about the “tsunami of emotions” she felt during that time - but explained how she turned them into perhaps her most honest album yet.


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The highly anticipated album 30 will arrive on November 19 and is expected to explore the separation and her relationship with son Angelo.

She said she had “never really felt present” in a happy home with her family.

“It made me really sad,” she told the American music magazine. “Then having so many people that I don’t know know that I didn’t make that work… it f****** devastated me. I was embarrassed.

“No one made me feel embarrassed, but you feel like you didn’t do a good job.”

According to Rolling Stone she suffered “an intense few weeks of bed-bound anxiety” following the split, until the day of her 31st birthday in May 2019.

“I felt quite hopeful,” Adele said. “It was the first time I felt I’d had a really nice evening and I was OK being in the house and going to bed on my own.

“I was not excited, but I was looking forward to the next day.” She added that the following day she woke up and “saw this tsunami of emotions” coming towards her.

“I was like, ‘this is going to be really f****** up-and-down’,” she said.

Credit: PA

Speaking about distracting herself from the emotional difficulty, the Rolling In The Deep singer said she threw herself “head first” into anything to soothe her anxiety, including travelling “anywhere where there’s meant to be brilliant energy”.

Reflecting on her weight loss and healthier lifestyle, she said: “(I thought) if I can transform my strength and my body like this, surely I can do it to my emotions and to my brain and to my inner well-being. That was what drove me.

“It just coincided with all of the emotional work that I was doing with myself as a visual for it, basically.”

A two-hour special, which features an interview with Oprah Winfrey and performance of some of Adele’s new tracks, will be broadcast on CBS on Sunday night.

An ITV concert to launch the album in the UK, recorded at the London Palladium, will air on November 21.

Adele said the loss of her father Mark Evans to cancer this year and her final conversation with him had “set her free”.

“I don’t think I understood the true deepness of how I felt about my dad until we spoke,” she said.

“I think I’ve never been fully in any of my relationships.

“I always had this fear from a really young age that you’re going to leave me anyway, so I’m going to leave or I’m not going to invest myself in anything.”



Referring to her father’s death she added: “It was like I let out one wail and something left. I’ve felt so calm ever since then. It really did set little me free.”

She told Rolling Stone that since the death she had reconnected with US sports agent Rich Paul, for the most “incredible, open-hearted and easiest” relationship she had been in.

“I’m not frightened of loneliness any more,” she said.