Jewel has long been an advocate for mental health through her Inspiring Children Foundation and, in recent years, the #NotAloneChallenge campaign. The campaign, which kicks off its fourth year on Friday, Oct. 10 — World Mental Health Day — promotes mental health resources to those who need them.
“The motivation was to go a step beyond raising awareness — to be able to put tools into people’s hands that are usable and free,” the Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter, whose full name is Jewel Kilcher, tells TODAY.com. “I think a lot of people don’t realize how many modalities there are. And so if one isn’t working for you, it’s not that you’re broken, it’s that you may not have the right tool.”
The tools on the website for the #NotAloneChallenge range from mood-boosting activities to information for help lines and in-person support.
Jewel, 51, honed her own tools, which she has described in numerous interviews, at a young age. Raised by an abusive father, she left home at 15 and would later struggle with panic attacks.
“Happiness wasn’t really taught in my household, and I wondered if it was a learnable skill or a teachable skill, or do kids like me just fall through the cracks, and you don’t have hope the rest of your life?” she recalls to TODAY.com. “So I set out on kind of this mission to see if it was a language that I could figure out how to speak, and I started writing as a side effect of that. It was sort of, you know, songs like ‘Who Will Save Your Soul’ or ‘Angel Standing By’ were sort of my medicine for myself.”
She has said other coping mechanisms, such as journaling and meditation, have helped her in her mental health journey. Reframing her relationship with anxiety has also been useful to her.
She says she “stopped thinking that anxiety meant something was wrong with me, and maybe it meant something was right with me, that my anxiety was my body’s way of telling me I was consuming something that didn’t agree with me. That there was a thought, a feeling or an action that I was consuming that made me anxious.
“And when I could start to bring awareness around those and then start curating which thoughts, feelings and actions I was participating in, it really made a big difference in my health,” she continues.
Regulating Her Fame
After she released her debut album, “Pieces of You,” featuring lead single “Who Will Save Your Soul,” in 1995, she faced a different sort of struggle in her life as she became a household name.
Jewel says she can look back at that time now with “more appreciation,” but in the moment she “didn’t really enjoy being that famous.”
“By the time I did ‘Spirit,’ my second album (released in 1998), I started to regulate how famous I got. I started to take years between albums to kill my momentum. My mental health just didn’t do good with being that level of fame,” she says, remembering how people followed her and simple tasks like grocery shopping became difficult.
“I was like, wait, I don’t actually have to be that famous. I can be less famous, and it’s not that hard to do. You take time between albums, and you go under the radar really quickly,” she adds. “And so how I’ve been able to manage my career now, the level that I have, is comfortable for me. It’s manageable for me. I’m able to do the things I want.
“So when I look back on that time I think of a lot of tiredness and exhaustion, but also exhilaration and wonder, because, you know, I had a dream come true.”
She refers to “Pieces of You” as a “sincere album” that hit record stores at the “height of coolness and cynicism and grunge” in the music world. It spawned multiple Billboard Hot 100 hits — “Who Will Save Your Soul,” “You Were Meant For Me” and “Foolish Games” — and went 12-times platinum.
“The trajectory of my life was altered because people invested in that album and invested in me as a person, invested in my writing and my heart. … I sometimes don’t know if people realize what a dynamic, real relationship it is,” she explains. “The reason I can do this 30 years later is because people supported me as I’ve gone into poetry or different genres or into mental health.”
Flexing Her Muscles (Literally) on Instagram
Jewel helped establish the Inspiring Children Foundation, a nonprofit that describes its mission as helping at-risk youth with physical, emotional, social and mental health, over 20 years ago. Its #NotAloneChallenge not only provides mental health tools, but also encourages people to join the movement by recording a video to express who they’re grateful for and to remind others that they are not alone.
The musician, who is mom to 14-year-old son Kase with ex-husband Ty Murray, has also put an emphasis on her physical health. She says she likes to practice yoga, do weight training, hike and embrace nature. The latter was evident in an Oct. 5 Instagram post in which she wrote, “Nature is so healing.”
A separate Instagram post a few weeks earlier received much more attention. On Sept. 16, she shared a selfie of her displaying her toned arms and legs.
“Summer recap: more travel, more lifting (because, 51 and gotta keep that muscle and bone up) more time with family and loved ones, more painting … more adventure, more joy,” she wrote.
Many of the comments on the post, which received nearly 68,000 likes, focused on her physique, but she doesn’t quite get what the fuss is about.
“I didn’t think it was going to be that big of a deal. It really got picked up,” she laughs. “Yeah, it was pretty funny to me.”