Lainey Wilson spent years grinding away in the music industry before she became a household name, but she initially had a tough time coping with her newfound fame.
In her new Netflix documentary, Lainey Wilson: Keepin’ Country Cool, the Grammy winner, 33, opened up about feeling anxiety and depression after her career took off around 2020.
“A couple years ago was wild. Everything I’d ever dreamed about kinda happened all at once,” she recalled in the film, which begins streaming Wednesday, April 22. “When opportunities come at you and you didn’t have any for so long, you wanna just take ’em all. And I guess a little bit of that was probably fear that they weren’t always gonna be there.”
The country superstar said she was “probably finding my self-worth” in her work, which caused her to put aside the person she is off stage.
“I think I was not feeling [like] myself for a couple years,” she explained. “I had reached a point where I was just like, ‘I don’t know if I’ll ever be the same.’ I was extremely anxious, and the anxiousness caused depression, and it’s like the depression caused more anxiousness because I was like, ‘Why in the world am I depressed during this time of my life? This is everything I’ve ever wanted.’”
She added, “I had several … several breakdowns, I guess you could say. I was just losing it. I was like, ‘I don’t know if I can go any further.’”
Wilson’s manager, Mandelyn Monchick, recalled a scary moment when the “Whirlwind” singer called her crying from an airport and saying she felt like she was “losing [her] mind.”
“I thought I was not gonna come back from that either,” Wilson remembered. “It was a solid panic attack for, like, multiple days. And I had played shows and everything while I was having the panic attack. It was terrifying. It was a chemical imbalance happening. I was, like, spiraling out of control. And then it’s the fear of thinking that you’re always gonna be stuck in that mindset — it causes more anxiety. It’s just, like, a vicious cycle.”
Wilson went on to say that she eventually got her bearings once she felt like her career was on more solid ground.
“I was putting so much pressure on myself to get it right, to be right, to be perfect, to show up, sing the damn song, look good doing it. All of these things to where it just, like, kept piling stress on top of me,” she said while getting emotional. “And I think once I realized that I can’t completely screw it up, like, say I hit a bad note, say I don’t look the best — I think just knowing that I found my place and I ain’t going anywhere, I feel like now that I’ve, like, put my stake in the ground, it definitely takes some stress off.”
The CMA Award winner added that one of her idols, Reba McEntire, gave her a piece of advice that really stuck with her. (Wilson and McEntire, 71, teamed up with Miranda Lambert last year for the single “Trailblazer.”)
“I said, ‘This is a loaded question, but what do you do when you feel like you can’t go any further?’” Wilson recalled. “And she said, ‘I do it for somebody else.’ And that right there has put so much in perspective for me. I get on that stage and I do it for other people.”
In her Us Weekly cover story last year, Wilson opened up about the day she realized she was no longer just a girl from a small town in Louisiana, going from “selling, like, 87 tickets in Tuscaloosa” to breaking attendance records at the New York State Fair just a few months later.
“I was getting ready for the show that day, and I was peeking out of the bus window, and I saw a few people putting their lawn chairs out,” she said in November 2025. “Then before I went on stage, somebody came on the bus and was like, ‘You’re not gonna believe how many people are out there.’ That was one of the first moments for me where I was like, ‘Click your boots together — we’re not in Baskin anymore.’”
Lainey Wilson: Keepin’ Country Cool debuts on Netflix Wednesday, April 22.
