I’m a fan of Meghan Trainor’s music. I have Lips Are Moving on my running loop and it always gives me an extra wiggle in my stride. But I don’t know that much about her. Like the fact that she had two vocal cord surgeries a few years back to repair hemorrhaging that forced her to cancel a bunch of planned tour dates. And I didn’t know that she suffers from debilitating anxiety, so much so that she’s been hospitalized during attacks. The good news is, since seeking medication and therapy, she’s been incident free for a long time, and that has made her feel pretty powerful.

Meghan Trainor is opening up about a debilitating battle with panic attacks.
As her stardom rose, Trainor faced setbacks, undergoing risky procedures to repair vocal cord hemorrhages in 2015 and again in 2017.

After her second surgery, she worried she might never sing again, and that stress spiraled into panic disorder. Panic disorder is a condition in which a person suffers recurrent, unexpected panic attacks — defined by the Mayo Clinic as “a sudden episode of intense fear that triggers severe physical reaction when there is no real danger or apparent cause.”

“I was working really hard, and I kept having to cancel tours [to undergo vocal cord surgeries]. I was like, ‘This is all I have, this is my life — if I can’t sing, I can’t work,’ ” Trainor recalls.

“It turned into a lot of sleepless nights and a lot of scary panic. I went to the emergency room a couple of times because I thought my throat was closing from an allergic reaction, and the doctor was like, ‘This is a panic attack.’ “

Trainor knew she needed to get a handle on her mental health and sought help.

“My doctors diagnosed me with panic disorder. They were like, ‘Your chemicals are way imbalanced — we have to get you back to normal,’ ” the singer adds.

“I met a psychologist who gave me medicine; I had therapists; I worked out; I got acupuncture,” Trainor says. “Now it’s been a couple years, and I haven’t had a panic attack in so long I feel like I conquered it. I kicked some ass.”

“There’s still that stigma” about mental-health problems and treating them with drugs, she says. “The best thing my doctor ever told me was, ‘You use an inhaler for your lungs, right? Why can’t you use medicine to fix your brain?’ That’s what got my parents to understand what was happening with me.”

“My therapist blew my mind with this: If you go through a really hard patch of anxiety, and you get out of it, you should reward yourself. So my big thing that I’m working on in life right now is treating myself and being good to myself because it’s a very hard thing to do — including taking care of my health and even how I talk about myself,” says Trainor, who married Spy Kids actor Daryl Sabara, 27, in December 2018.

She continues, “My husband will catch me being like, ‘I’m huge today’ or ‘I feel so ugly,’ and he’ll be like, ‘Hey, tell yourself you’re pretty. You’re beautiful — remind yourself.’”

[From People]

Meghan’s take is important and will hopefully reach other anxiety sufferers. I especially like her therapist’s approach to medication. My son was diagnosed with ADHD at age five after having a very hard time in his classrooms. When we first considered medication, a lot of people were pretty vocal in their disdain. The unspoken notion was that those who medicated for ADHD were either lazy or ineffective parents, it was a huge stigma. When I spoke to my son’s psychologist about the concerns that had been voiced to me, he said, “you know, your son doesn’t like getting in trouble either. Why not give him what he needs to work on that.” We medicated and it made all the difference in the world. So much, that when he turned 12, he had learned enough behavior cues and modification techniques, he pulled himself off all medication. I like the way Meghan’s therapist put it. We would do whatever we need to help our physical health, I wish we would look after our mental health in the same way.

Meghan’s next album is titled Treat Yourself, so she really took that advice to heart. I love it applied to mental health survival. When I emerge from a depressed episode, I am just so f-cking relieved to be out of the cave that it’s never occurred to me I should acknowledge what it took for me to pull through. As for verbal affirmations, telling yourself something and believing it at that moment are two very different things. So it’s great that her husband looks out for her during those times.

Meghan appeared in a Nikkie de Jager tutorial and mentioned she’s taking a break after her next tour to try for a baby. She and husband, Daryl Sabara, have been married since 2018. Speaking of Daryl, I wonder what happened with his car vandalization case?

Photo credit: WENN/Avalon