Harry Styles Is Committed to Weekly Therapy So He Can Address a Feeling He’s Struggled With for Years
As one of today’s biggest stars, Harry Styles has captivated the world with his vulnerability on stage and in front of the cameras. He is seen as a style icon for his gender-fluid fashion and a rockstar twice over after his success with both his first band, One Direction, and his solo career.
Now he’s become a movie star with his upcoming leading roles in My Policeman and Don’t Worry Darling. Styles, who once considered a career in physiotherapy, is championing a new cause, mental health, by speaking candidly about his experiences and dedication to personal therapy.
How Harry Styles survived pandemic isolation
The pandemic was an incredibly difficult time for the world over. Styles was no exception. The ensuing isolation caused by the outbreak of COVID-19 acted as a great leveler. It did not matter if you were a celebrity when lockdowns quarantined everyone for months on end. It could be argued that those accustomed to being surrounded by so many people all of the time may have felt the sudden lockdown even more strongly.
Styles, whose song “Watermelon Sugar” became a No. 1 hit during the pandemic, detailed his lockdown experience to Rolling Stone. “I really would’ve struggled if I’d done the whole thing by myself,” he explained.
The now-28-year-old spent much of the pandemic living with his producers and co-writers, Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson, and creating Harry’s House. However, the isolation during the pandemic did for Styles what it did for many others; it quieted incredibly busy lives and allowed for deep introspection.
Harry Styles’ weekly therapy ‘workout’ sessions
That introspection has only deepened for Styles as his fame has grown exponentially. Brittany Spanos from Rolling Stone wrote poetically of her conversation with Styles. She noted the star’s concerns over how to be so many things to so many people and still maintain a sense of self.
“He worries about how he can be one of the biggest pop stars in the world, the kind who can be everything for his fans while also being a great son, brother, friend, and partner to the people standing beside him,” Spanos writes.
Styles points to his dedication to therapy — along with his habitual post-show showers — as a help for these concerns. “I committed to doing it once a week,” he explains, likening his therapy sessions to his workout sessions at the gym. “I felt like I exercise every day and take care of my body, so why wouldn’t I do that with my mind?”
Therapy helped Styles with his latent sense of shame and the art of compartmentalizing
Styles was only 16 years old when One Direction auditioned for X-Factor in 2010. The fame that followed led to hyper-attention on Styles’ sex life, something he notes created a deep sense of shame in him.
“So many of your emotions are so foreign before you start analyzing them properly,” Styles tells Rolling Stone. “I like to really lean into [an emotion] and look at it in the face.”
As a result, Styles has adopted a process of compartmentalizing — a sense of balance between what he needs to keep private to maintain his sense of peace and individualization and what he wants to share with the world. But still, behind his positive disposition, Styles worries about whether keeping parts of himself for himself — namely his highly-publicized link to Don’t Worry Darling director, Olivia Wilde — makes him hypocritical.
Yet this concern is exactly what created the fever pitch surrounding Styles. It is in Styles’ willingness to reveal his struggle to preserve the asset the world so greedily laps at while, at the same time, disclosing ever more of himself in the process that makes him what Rolling Stone refers to as “the world’s most wanted man.”
