Brett Eldredge knows it’s plenty easy to wake up on the metaphorical wrong side of the bed and to carry that pessimism and negativity with you throughout the day, whether it’s justified or not — especially when so much of everyday life has been turned upside down by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I’d get very negative about things, even when I woke up in the morning,” Eldredge recalls of how he used to operate. So, he started working on himself.
Therapy was a big part of the process; it’s why the country star has begun speaking more openly about the importance of prioritizing your mental health.
“Being a kid from a really tiny Midwest town … I don’t think I even really knew what a therapist was,” he admits in a virtual roundtable with media. “It just wasn’t really a thing … You just think of it as something that’s not for you or not gonna help you, or it makes you a crazy person if you go … so it took me a long tie to get to that place even to understand that it wasn’t a shameful thing.”
Therapy, he says, has “helped me figure out why I am the way I am … It makes me stronger, in a way … It’s taught me resilience, it’s taught me to be a better creator and a better friend and a better person.”
Eldredge has also found that good sleep habits and a round of meditation when he wakes up in the morning help put him in the right mindset for a good day. On particularly tough ones, though, he forces himself to get outside and do some sort of physical activity; if nothing else, that burst of endorphins is enough to buoy his spirit a bit and a reminder that he accomplished at least one good thing.
Eldredge’s newest single, “Good Day” — the second from his 2020 album Sunday Drive — is a musical reminder of the power of positivity, too. At the time he wrote it with Ian Fitchuk and Daniel Tashian, his record’s co-producers, the singer was looking for “that good-feeling song that is more than just a good-feeling song” for himself, but as the one-year anniversary of the pandemic nears, he thinks it’s a message we all need to hear.
“The decision to wake up and not focus on the negative things … was a big message for myself to learn, ’cause I can find a lot of things to be negative about …,” he muses. “[I needed to teach myself to be] able to try to find some optimism and say, ‘You know what, I’m gonna have a good day and spread that optimism around … I’m gonna have a good day, even if there’s a lot of negative things; I’m gonna put my best self forward, I’m gonna be there for other people, I’m gonna be there for myself, and I’m gonna have a good day and make that decision when I wake up.'”
The country star know it’s not easy to be this vulnerable, even if you’re not a handsome guy with an upbeat public persona and a cute dog. But he wants to be the person who can show someone else that life isn’t always what it appears on social media — even, and perhaps especially, for a celebrity — and that that’s okay.
“I wanna open others to the idea of being able to be open to that and share their feelings and their emotions,” Eldredge says, explaining that this focused-on-the-good mindset has “helped me grow, it’s helped me cope,” and it’s helped him see how others handle their own negative emotions.
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