Justin Bieber has been giving fans a closer look at the the past few years of his life in his YouTube documentary series, Justin Bieber: Seasons.
And on Monday’s episode, the 25-year-old, whose latest album, Changes, was released on February 14, opened up about his mental health.
In particular, Bieber recalled a set of paparazzi photos that made headlines in August of 2018, which depicted his then-fiancee Hailey Baldwin comforting him as he cried outside in New York City.
“I’m just being a normal person and crying,” he said of the photos, which at the time, led to rumors he was having a breakdown.
“When I’m in the media and I look at things on the Internet and people are like, ‘Justin’s upset, why is he upset?’ It’s like they don’t give me permission to be upset,” Bieber explained.
“There’s so many people, every day, who are in conversation with their girl or their wife or their mom and they break down. But they don’t have cameras capturing it,” he went on to say, adding, “So people are like, ‘Is he okay, is he having a mental breakdown?’ And I’m just emotional … and that’s okay.”
The cause of Bieber’s distress the day of the paparazzi photos came down to being overwhelmed, as Bieber later explained.
“I remember just struggling,” he said. “There’s been a lot of things that have happened in my life, and I think this was a point in my life where I was just so overwhelmed.”
To help better manage his stress, Bieber has been seeing a health coach, Dr. Buzz Mingin, who has taught him techniques like the psychosensory technique, havening, to deal with feeling overwhelmed.
“There’s always going to be good days and bad days - if you work a 9 to 5 job or if you’re Justin,” his wife, Baldwin, said.
“It doesn’t really matter who you are, everybody’s going to have days where they feel crappy and they don’t feel like pushing through that day, but it’s part of life."
