James Arthur was on ‘self-destruct’ mode

James Arthur "hit the self-destruct button" when he first found fame.

The ‘Say You Won’t Let Go’ hitmaker feels he succumbed to the pressure of his meteorological rise to fame and coupled with not being "mentally in a good place", he found himself spiralling out of control.

He shared: "I wasn’t really mentally in a good place before I did ‘The X Factor’. The pressure got to me – I was having these bad anxiety attacks all the time. The way that I would deal with that was by self-medicating; it spiralled out of control. I hit the self-destruct button."

After he was dropped from his record label, it was a huge wake up call and he desperately tried to reconnect with his family and friends who he had shut out.

He added: "Everyone wrote me off including me … I felt like I was a joke in this country, and I didn’t want to feel like that anymore. I quickly realised that smoking the amount of weed I was smoking and taking the pills I was taking was not helping. I decided to help myself, reconnect with friends and family who I’d previously stopped talking to to try to cope with it all by myself."

And the 28-year-old singer isn’t worried about slipping back to his old ways as he feels "more equipped to deal" with his fame now.

He told Billboard magazine: "I’m more equipped to deal with it. There’s a lot of nonsense of course, and it can make you anxious because you never know what to expect.

"Before I would just smoke a lot of weed and take some prescription pills. Now I’m trying to take each day at a time without looking too far ahead, which I think is a much better approach."