J. Cole on How Meditation, Staying Off Social Media Has Helped His Mental Health

J. Cole sat down with Kevin Hart for his show Hart To Heart on Peacock, and opened up about how meditation and staying off social media has benefited his mental health.

The Off-Season artist said that his new publicist had helped him find his way back to utilizing the art of meditation. “So I got with this new publicist, Kathryn Frazier, and she’s [an] amazing woman. She was telling me how she was into meditation, transcendental meditation,” said J. Cole, per VIBE. “And I had flirted with it in my early twenties, practice it a little bit..didn’t know what I was doing, but had a nice little experience. But I didn’t dive into it. But mind you, her telling me about that was coinciding with me, realizing, yo, something, something’s going on.”

The rapper also shared how changing his interactions with social media has improved his overall wellbeing. “I had set rules for myself. One was like, ‘bro, you can’t go on social media no more’…Nobody’s there to be like, don’t Google yourself. Don’t search your name,” he said. “I had set some rules for myself, some baseline rules like, yo, don’t go on Twitter. Don’t read your replies.That’s rule number one. Number two, when you’re creating, you got to create from a pure place only. That was a rule I set for myself. Everything has to only be truly what you feel in your heart.”

In the interview, J. Cole also talked about how female rappers have changed the music industry and are “doing some of the most exciting [music] commercially.”

“They giving us a lot of fire moments,” he touted. “I feel like that’s something that wasn’t around when we was growing up. There was always one. There could never be more than one [woman]. Now, it’s like, we getting moments, and moments, and moments. I think that’s hard.”

The full interview will stream on Peacock on July 27.