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Jewel opens up about mental health and battling anxietyShe will host the inaugural Not Alone Awards on Tuesday, Nov. 11, at The Wynn Las Vegas. The awards will stream live on iHeartRadio’s YouTubeThe #NotAlone Awards will honor innovators transforming the global mental health conversation
Jewel doesn’t own a TV. She wakes without reaching for her phone. She teaches kids that meditation isn’t a luxury — it’s hygiene.
Sitting comfortably in her quiet home, the four-time Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter, 51, appears on Zoom wearing a beanie and maroon sweatshirt, makeup-free and serene, speaking like someone who’s lived through both chaos and calm — and decided that peace was worth the fight.
“I hadn’t had a panic attack for decades,” she tells PEOPLE softly. “Until, gosh, maybe a couple of years ago. Once I found out what my triggers are, I was able to start to really help support myself around those times.”
For Jewel, who is set to host iHeartRadio’s first Not Alone Awards on Tuesday, Nov. 11 at The Wynn Las Vegas with Loni Love and Bozoma Saint John, anxiety isn’t an enemy. It’s a messenger.
“I look at it as my body’s way of telling me something,” she says. “Once I started to look at anxiety as my ally instead of something I had to disassociate or repress or control, things really shifted for me.”
Jewel NotAlone Summit in Vegas on Nov. 10, 2025.
Luther Redd
Her life now moves by a gentler rhythm. She journals, hikes in nature, meditates and creates art. She puts her phone down at 5 p.m.
“Waking up and looking at my texts right away is not a good thing for me,” she tells PEOPLE exclusively. “That urge to wake up right away and just look at your phone — it starts getting you engaged, and that’s not fun for my mental health.” She laughs, a sound as calm as her words. “I got rid of all my televisions. I don’t have any TVs in the house.”
It’s not detachment; it’s discernment. “I don’t think the news was actually giving me facts about the world,” she says. “It was just giving me an emotional wrench.”
Jewel has long turned her suffering into service. Through her Inspiring Children Foundation and the Not Alone Challenge, she builds bridges between awareness and action.
“Raising awareness about mental health without offering help is kind of just mean,” she admits. “People are pretty aware they don’t feel good, so now what?”
What she offers instead are tools — free, practical, and tested by her own life. Peppermint for panic and ice for grounding. Truth instead of hollow affirmation. “When I was acting for Ang Lee, I didn’t know what I was doing,” she remembers of the 1999 film Ride with the Devil, which marked her acting debut. She played Sue Lee Shelley in the Civil War epic, opposite Tobey Maguire and Skeet Ulrich. Lee was Jewel’s first director and spoke about his guidance and support during the challenging filming process.
“If I looked in the mirror and said, ‘I know what I’m doing,’ my body didn’t believe it. The truth was, I didn’t know what I was doing. So I changed it to, ‘I won’t quit till I learn.’ My whole being calms down when I say that.”
Jewel on May 3, 2024.
Wesley Hitt/Getty
She still believes music heals. “All my songs were medicine for me,” she says. “‘Life Uncommon’ was my own anthem for myself. ‘Angel Standing By’ was to help me with my anxiety. My album Lullaby was my big anti-anxiety album.”
Designed to uplift, entertain and inspire, the Not Alone Awards honor innovators transforming the global mental health conversation. It is sponsored by Villa Bibbiani and the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Foundation and will feature performances by Jewel, Flavor Flav, Rachel Platten, Alec Benjamin, JP Saxe, Cassadee Pope, Bishop Briggs and Darryl “DMC” McDaniels. Mike Tyson, Chevy Chase, Jonah Marais and Tallulah Willis are among those set to make special appearances.
An extension of Jewel’s 4-year-old #NotAloneChallenge, the event continues the mission to remind people they are not alone in their mental health journey. The social media campaign provides free mental health tools and resources to those in need and has received widespread support from Billie Eilish, Jada Pinkett Smith, Lionel Richie, David Foster, Josh Groban, Tory Burch, Mark Burnett, Jake Shane and Paris Hilton.
Jewel’s philosophy — equal parts grit and grace — comes from hard-won wisdom. As a teenager in Alaska, Jewel stared out over the ocean, fighting depression.
“I sat there for probably eight hours,” she tells PEOPLE. “The tide went out a mile and came back in. And it suddenly dawned on me that all of nature is change. That meant I was part of the universe, and it was very arrogant of me to think I would be the only thing that might not change.”
When the singer was 8, her mother, Lenedra Carroll, left the family, and Jewel and her two brothers were raised by their father Atz Kilcher (a star on Discovery’s Alaska: The Last Frontier) on their 300-acre ranch in Homer, Alaska.
“I grew up in a very traditional Mormon family. But everything changed when my mom left. My dad started drinking and being physically abusive, so like hitting us, and that’s what caused me to move out,” the musician told PEOPLE in 2024, who previously detailed her father’s abuse in her 2015 memoir. “He was in a lot of rage and a lot of yelling.”
Outside of her family home, she says she also faced sexual harassment from a young age. At 8 years old, she would have men tell her, “Call me when you’re 16. You’re going to be a great f—,” she recalls. Another time, a man slammed her against a wall after her performance at a local bar when she was 12, demanding to know if she had “cheated” on him, she said.
After years of mistreatment, she was no longer willing to put up with Kilcher’s abuse, and Jewel — who opened up to PEOPLE in 2020 about reconciling with Kilcher, a Vietnam veteran who developed PTSD, after he got sober in his 60s — moved off her family’s homestead and into her own cabin at 15, when she began shoplifting to survive.
Since then, Jewel has treated emotions as tides, not prisons. During the Not Alone Summit on Tuesday, Kilcher stood up in the crowd and said his greatest accomplishment was having her. “Sometimes the tide is just out,” Jewel adds. “And so, you buckle in and you know it’s not forever — the tide always comes back in.”
Jewel at the NotAlone summit in Los Vegas on Nov. 10, 2025.
Luther Redd
In 1993, Jewel moved to San Diego, where she worked at a computer warehouse to pay the bills while pursuing her music career. Her boss fired her after she turned down his advances, and she was left broke and homeless after her car was stolen.
“It was a violent era, but the Hells Angels actually were very protective over me. But there’s still violence,” Jewel, who suffered from anxiety and panic attacks, kidney problems and agoraphobia (an intense fear of leaving the house alone or of being in crowded places), told PEOPLE in 2024. “It was men in positions of power from TV networks to record labels, and women faced it every day.”
The harassment only worsened when her music career began taking off, and today she throws her support behind younger female artists, young adults and children in the mental health space to protect them against the abuse she endured.
Even now, as she navigates motherhood, fame and activism, her compass doesn’t waver. “Nothing’s worth it to me,” she says. “I’m not going to sacrifice everything for my peace of mind.”
Asked what she wants to change in the world, she doesn’t hesitate. “Disconnection is the heart of everything,” she says. “We’ve lost the ability to connect to ourselves and enjoy being alone. We’ve lost the ability to connect to one another. And we’ve lost the ability to connect to the planet. The only medicine I know is to help people connect.”
She pauses, a smile flickering, soft, but sure. “And that’s probably what I’ll do till I pass.”
The Not Alone Awards 2025 begins live-streaming on YouTube at 11 p.m. ET/8 p.m. PT.
If you or someone you know needs mental health help, text “STRENGTH” to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 to be connected to a certified crisis counselor.