Simon Cowell has said becoming a father saved him from his ‘dark’ obsession with work.
The Britain’s Got Talent and X Factor creator, 63, revealed he was so consumed with ratings wars against shows like Strictly Come Dancing that he sank into a depression.
Before eight-year-old Eric was born in 2014, the music mogul would often work through the night until 4am – admitting his life was “99 per cent work”.
The TV legend told how he suffered crippling lows when the smash hit ITV show began to slump before ending in 2018.
He said he’s ‘not a wall puncher’, but admitted ‘tearing his hair out’ in a bid to get one over on all the other shows.
Without Eric and his fiancée Lauren Silverman, Simon said he might still be trapped in a toxic cycle of misery now.
“I stopped enjoying what I was doing and I was miserable the whole time,” he told The Sun.
“I took it to a ridiculous level and I would get really down about that stuff, to the point I was depressed. If Eric hadn’t come along, God knows what would have happened.”
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In the past few years, the 63-year-old has dramatically overhauled his life to make it fit around his family rather than work.
He said he no longer works through the night and is a very different man these days to the workaholic he used to be.
After losing his own mum and dad, Simon shared that having Eric ‘changed everything’ in his life.
“After I lost my mum and dad, you kind of think you’re never going to feel that love again – then you have kids," he said.
“Though I never thought I would feel that way – it’s beyond your love for your parents. It almost hurts how much you love them.”
Simon has previously said being “terrified” of burn-out from running his production company forced him to put his health first and spend more time with son Eric.
A consequence of reducing his workload was that he was able to pick him up from school every day and have dinner with him every night.
His decision to slow down was also the result of two electric bike injuries in recent years, including one in August 2020 in which he broke his back.
Simon’s most recent comments come after his latest project launched on Wednesday.
StemDrop grants TikTok creators worldwide access to exclusive music “stems”, inviting them to produce their own versions of a brand-new song written by prolific hitmakers.
The project, led by Swedish record producer Max Martin and backed by Simon and Syco Entertainment along with Universal Music Group, has been described by Universal chairman and chief executive Sir Lucian Grainge as inviting “a new evolution of musical collaboration, curation and artist discovery”.
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