Ed Sheeran reveals that he had to take time off from his red-hot career after he found himself “slipping” into substance abuse issues.

The 26-year-old “Shape of You” singer made his candid confession while taping Saturday’s The Jonathan Ross Show.

“I think you need to, when you get into the industry, adjust to it — and I didn’t adjust because I was constantly working on tour,” Sheeran said. “And all the pitfalls that people read about, I just found myself slipping into all of them. Mostly, like, substance abuse.” “I never touched anything,” he continued. “I started slipping into it, and that’s why I took a year off and buggered off.”

During his downtime, he tried to get back to basics.“I focused on work, and I can’t work under the influence, I can’t write songs under the influence, I can’t perform under the influence — so the more I worked the less [that happened].

I’ve worked my whole life to get to where I am and you can’t lose that over something that you do in your spare time,” Sheeran explained.

In addition to music, he credits his girlfriend, Cherry Seaborn, 24, for helping through his struggles with substance abuse.

“I didn’t really notice it was happening. It just started gradually happening, and then some people took me to one side and were like, ‘Calm yourself down’… It’s all fun to begin with, it all starts off as a party and then you’re doing it on your own and it’s not, so that was a wake-up call and taking a year off,” he revealed.

He and Seaborn, said Sheeran, “live together now, and I think that was a real help grounding me. I was a 25 year old in the music industry on tour so I just needed someone to balance me out.”

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