LeAnn Rimes explains why she tells her psoriasis ‘I love you’

LeAnn Rimes is no longer shying away from her psoriasis. The singer/songwriter recently revealed she's been struggling with the auto-immune skin disease since the age of two and spoke to Yahoo Life about how she is mentally dealing with a recent breakout - her first in 16 years.

“I'm finding more peace within my whole experience, not just when I'm healthy and when I look good,” she says. “But also … within the more challenging days where I’m broken out and sad and depleted.”

Rimes uses a novel application of self-love on especially difficult days.

“One of my practices has been literally looking at my psoriasis and putting my hand on myself and going, ‘I love you,’” she says. “There's something beautiful about physical touch, that [our hands] are so healing.”

Video Transcript

LEANN RIMES: (SINGING) Be still and know. Be still and know.

Hi, everyone. I'm LeAnn Rimes, and I am here today to talk to you about mental health. My journey started about eight years ago when I checked myself into a mental health facility for anxiety and depression. That was of my choosing. It was at a time when I was at what felt like my rock bottom and needed-- needed some sort of grounding.

One of my greatest lessons on this journey is that there really are no good and bad emotions, and they just are. It's a guidance tool. And so to-- to take away what's good and bad and to allow ourselves to fully become intimate with our whole spectrum of feelings is so important.

(SINGING) I've learned to love what I cannot change. Oh, what I cannot change. Oh, what I cannot change.

My emotional state in the past has definitely taken its toll on my-- my physical well-being. I was diagnosed with psoriasis when I was two years old and have been on that journey of autoimmune disease for my whole life basically, and I haven't had a psoriasis break out in 16 years. And just recently, I have been broken out through this whole stress of COVID and lockdown. And, you know, I've been on the road since I was 13, and all of a sudden my livelihood is gone like a lot of peoples.

And so but I feel like I'm now coming to the other side of it, where I'm finding-- I'm finding more peace within my whole experience. Not just like when I'm healthy, and when I look good, and I-- you know, I feel really good about myself-- but also you finding peace within the more challenging days where I'm broken out, and I'm sad, and I'm, you know, depleted. Part of one of my practices was literally like, it has been literally like looking at my psoriasis and putting my hand on myself and going, I love you. And there's something beautiful about physical touch that these are so healing-- just our hands.

Eventually it all melts. If we do it enough, if we're with ourselves enough and compassionate enough, like, that love not-- it's not just words. You really start to feel it.

(SINGING) I will change. I will change whatever I can. Yeah, I will change. I will change whatever I can.

One of the things that has been really beautiful and healing for me is to be able to sit and just let nature be my TV screen, to literally sit and be and watch and experience life. And I started out at like three minutes. I literally-- because it was-- I was fidgety. And I'm like, oh, I can't do this. And then, you know, building up time to be able to sit, and be, and, man, it's such-- it's probably one of my favorite things to do because there's so much peace that comes from that.

And there's so much that we actually give ourselves a moment to be-- to be in communion with the universe. To me, mental health is vulnerability, and honesty, and feeling, and being honest and vulnerable with what is going on inside of us and to not hide. I think that's super important.

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