Rylan Clark has admitted he was “really in a bad way” during his four-month break from social media and said he never thought something like that could happen to him.
The TV presenter, 33, said in a statement in July that he and his former husband Dan Neal were both “prioritising” their mental health following their separation after six years of marriage.
Clark-Neal, who has hosted programmes including Strictly Come Dancing’s spinoff show It Takes Two since finding fame on The X Factor in 2012, said he wished he had had the ability to go to work to “try and distract” himself from what was going on in his life.
Speaking to Davina McCall on his own podcast Ry-Union, he said: “I was ill. I was really in a bad way for that four months.
“It’s really strange, because lately, I’ve been thinking about it. It was summer as well. Last summer was really hot and people were enjoying themselves and I had no phone.”
The TV presenter explained that during this time he did not look at the news and he handed his social media accounts over to his management team.
He added: “I saw nothing. In one respect, that was the best thing for me. In the same respect, I look back now and I do regret how I got, but I couldn’t help how I got.
“I wished I’d just gone to work. I wish I had the ability to go to work and try and distract myself from what was going on in my life, but I actually couldn’t.
“For every hour that passed, it got worse and worse and worse.
“It took a lot for me to go back to social media but I knew I had to do it, for want of a better term, to feel normal again because it was part of my job and it was part of my life.”
So…. What did I miss?
— R Y L A N (@Rylan) September 16, 2021
Clark returned to Twitter in September after a break of more than five months, tweeting: “So…. What did I miss?”
The TV star previously revealed his weight plummeted to under 10 stone due to the stress of his marriage breakdown and he had turned to exercise to help “save” him.
He added: “I never thought that something like that would ever happen to me, like that I’d mentally get so bad.
“But now it has, it doesn’t scare me that it can happen again.
“It just makes me realise that you’re not invincible and, whatever life throws at you now, as hard as things might be, I’ve been there…
“Once you’ve been there, you know you’ve got it in you to never let yourself go that far again because, ultimately, it is you. It is you that lets you go there…
“And as much as I’ll have my days where I feel s**t, I then have to realise actually that, where I was was the worst place I could’ve been.
“And where I am now, even if I don’t feel amazing, it’s not there.”