Noah Kahan Opens Up About 'Complicated' Struggles with Body Dysmorphia & Mental Health

Noah Kahan is speaking candidly about his struggles.

While promoting his new documentary Out of Body on Jay Shetty‘s On Purpose podcast, the 29-year-old “Stick Season” singer opened up about how fame has affected his mental health and body dysmorphia.

When asked if his mental health has gotten better or worse as he became successful, Noah said his “mental health challenges weren’t going anywhere.”

Keep reading to find out more…“Whether I became a musician, like a touring professional musician or whatever I am, they weren’t going anywhere,” Noah admitted. “I would have been interested to see how they manifested. I think it’s introduced this lifestyle, and this level of self-focused business lifestyle has created a lot of mental health challenges for me.”

“Also [it] has kind of allowed me to confront them in a way that maybe like if I went to college and went and got a job in an office or somewhere I could probably more easily not ever deal with it,” he continued.

“In a lot of ways, I think it’s helped me, but it’s also introduced a lot of different challenges into my life,” Noah added, noting that among those challenges are touring, performing, and the “creative struggle” of the music industry.

As for his day-to-day mental health, Noah said he thinks about his self-image, which “extends to physical image but also mental image.”

“I worry that I’ve just wasted so much time hating who I am,” the Grammy-nominated singer said. “Being aware of this thing that’s happening to me that feels like it’s grinding me down sometimes and knowing that I have this thing and that knowing that it could be better but it’s not right now.”

“Like I wake up and I’m like, ‘Why do I feel like s–t?’ I’m pissed. It’s a beautiful morning. The birds are f–king chirping. It’s beautiful outside,’” he explained. “Career success aside, I have this lovely little life, and I wish I could wake up and not be miserable for no reason, it feels like, sometimes. Being aware of those moments that I just can’t feel connected, it’s really lonely.”

Noah went on to share that these feelings “escalate” and can become bigger mental health issues for him. While there are days that he feels better, Noah admitted that there are moments where he wishes he “didn’t feel depressed.”

Also during his appearance on the podcast, Noah talked about his struggles with body dysmorphia. He noted that he “never really confronted” how he felt about his body before. “It’s like it’s just this thing that lives in the back of my brain that is like more prominent than other times.”

“It really came out in the documentary, and watching that back is like, even my mom was just like, I had no idea,” Noah shared. “I think she knew I had something like that, but she didn’t know how much it was affecting me, and even just seeing myself, I’m like, I don’t feel like that right now, but I do feel like that a lot and it’s hard when the thing that you really compartmentalize and you lock away is now there.”

He said that he hasn’t spoken a lot about body dysmorphia in the past because he didn’t want to misrepresent how others are feeling, calling it a “difficult concept” to “describe succinctly.”

In his song “Shape of My Shadow,” Noah sings about his self-image, and he said he didn’t realize the impact it had on other people until he started performing it live.

“This is something really, really difficult to articulate and to talk about, and the fact that I just had three people that probably wouldn’t have said anything to me if I never played that song come up and say, ‘Hey dude, thank you’ or ‘I get that,’ that’s huge,” Noah explained. “It was really special.”

“You never f—ing know what someone’s going through,” he concluded.

If you didn’t see, Noah will soon be hitting the road on his The Great Divide Tour! Check out the tour dates and stops here.

Noah‘s Out of Body documentary hits Netflix on April 13.