IT’S COMMON KNOWLEDGE – for Directioners, at least – that Mullingar’s Niall Horan suffers from OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder).
Now, in a new interview with German magazine Zeit Leo, he’s spoken about his ticks and how the diagnosis has affected his live performances.
I have mild obsessive compulsive disorder, that’s what doctors call it. That is, I feel like I have to do things in a certain way. For example, if I have a burger with chips on my plate, I always have to eat the chips first and only pick up the burger at the very end.
I have one fixed sequence. I always have to sing in the same order, move and so on. I’ll basically do everything immediately, otherwise I’ll get nervous quickly.”
He also, unbeknownst to him, gave out some pretty sound Leaving Cert advice:
That’s why in school I learned to start studying for tests very early. Otherwise I’d be afraid of the pressure.”
Niall admitted that his ticks used to bother him, but reckons he’s lucky to have “enough people around me who understand me”.
He’s not the first 1D to get candid about their mental health battles – former One Direction member Zayn Malik suffers from anxiety. However, he’s recently admitted that he’s learning to handle it in order to promote his upcoming second album.
“I wasn’t as prominent throughout the promo on the first record as I maybe would have like to have been,” he told Beats 1. “But I think they understood that that came from a confidence thing that I might have been going through at the time.”
