Yahoo Finance Andy Grammer Says the Pandemic Was 'Excruciating' and 'Enlightening' for His Mental Health
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Even Andy Grammer has found it hard to keep his head up in recent years.
The Art of Joy artist, 38, reflected on discovering the importance of therapy during the COVID-19 pandemic as he appeared on Friday's episode of the PEOPLE Every Day podcast with host Janine Rubenstein, ahead of World Mental Health Day on Monday, Oct. 10.
"I went down hard. I don't know how your pandemic was. Mine was not good. In hindsight, it became something that I'm grateful for, but I think for a lot of us, it just really showed us where we get our self-worth from," he explained. "So if you got all your self-worth from others or from work or not from yourself, the place that it should be coming from, then the pandemic was really, really tough for you. And by you, I mean me. Wow. A hundred percent me.
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"So, it just got to a place where I had to make it a priority in my life to make sure that everything up inside my head was working out well and that I had some self-love and some self-knowledge, and therapy helped me a lot with that. So I've been trying to speak up as much as possible, that you don't have to get to a place that's really terrible to just make it a priority in your life," Grammer said.
He also lamented the cancellations of touring and live performances, adding: "There was no way to go do the thing that I love. And it made me really dive into joy.
"I'm, by nature, a pretty happy guy and I write music about this all the time. And yeah, so I found a definition of joy that was 'gladness not based on circumstance,'" he said. "And I think when I read that quote I was like, I don't have that. I don't, I definitely don't have that because I need a lot of the circumstances in my life to be exactly right for me to be really happy."
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Grammer continued: "And so that was kind of a cool self-learning moment of, 'Well, I gotta figure out how to get this from myself. I can't be reliant on shows or crowds or the right coffee or the right friend group. I get there's gotta be a way that I can get it from inside myself and I'm working on it. I'm getting there.'"
The "Keep Your Head Up" artist, who has been known to use his music to promote mental health, explained that quarantine forced him to examine his own joy, which he realized he wasn't getting from himself.
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"So when you make a big shift of all that, like a pandemic, it was excruciating for me, but also very enlightening," Grammer added.
In addition to therapy, Grammer has been finding solace in writing music, as well as his wife Aijia Grammer and their daughters Louisiana "Louie" K, 5, and 2½-year-old Israel "Izzy" Blue.
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