Tulisa Contostavlos has told how she became hooked on prescription drugs during the covid lockdown – and felt like “she was going to die” when she tried to kick the habit.

In one of her most revealing interviews ever, the singer and former X Factor judge, laid bare the problems she had for several Yeats until January this year and also revealed what really happened to her in the I’m A Celebrity jungle.

But before she entered the ITV show she has been fighting a secret dependency which threatened to take over her life. Tulisa said: “I was dependent without realising… I just went cold turkey for five days and I ended up in hospital because I didn’t know, but my body had become dependent on it. I felt like I was having a heart attack. I had pains in my chest…. I just literally felt like I was going to die.”

The 36-year-old decided to speak out about the issue with podcaster Paul C Brunson for an in-depth discussion where she is given time to put her ups and downs in context.

Tulisa opens up to Paul C Brunson in his We Need To Talk podcast

In the second part of the conversation which listeners can hear tomorrow, Tulisa says: “Sometimes you don’t want to draw attention to things that people don’t know about, but one thing I’ve found off the back of coming off of I’m A Celeb, that I’m sure about, is maybe so much the showbiz world isn’t for me in the commercial sense, and the tits and teeth.

“But authenticity is and if I’m going to be in this industry and remain in it, I want to be really authentic and I want to speak words and do things that will make some kind of a difference. So I will tell you that running up to I’m A Celeb, during lockdown, I unfortunately became dependent on benzodiazepine. So we’re talking zopiclones and diazepam(pills which help with sleep and anxiety).

“I had a backlog of them for flying, for sleeping issues from the trial, tons of them. I was alone during lockdown. I found out my dog had cancer. I got very depressed and I began self medicating. Now, as lockdown finished, for me it was time to get back to reality. I was like, ‘I can’t numb myself every day and this anxiety, I can’t get to sleep with a sleeper every night. I can’t have a diazepam when it hits 9pm to calm me down. So it’s time to stop’.

“But by this point, what I hadn’t realised was, when you’re taking something every day to knock yourself out, you don’t realise if I skip two days and I start feeling anxiety and withdrawals because I was dependent without realising.” Tulisa says she felt like she had “gone crazy” because of the dependency. She would try to go without it but after two days would be “shaking and having anxiety attacks”.

She added: “Anyway, I came to the point where I was like, ‘Enough is enough. I don’t care how bad it feels when I don’t take it, I’m gonna stop taking it’. So I just went cold turkey for five days and I ended up in hospital because I didn’t know, but my body had become dependent on it. I felt like I was having a heart attack. I had pains in my chest. Obviously, your body can have convulsions, muscle spasms, so what was happening was my heart was spasming, so to speak. It was clenching and it was this constant feeling of my chest closing up. I just literally felt like I was going to die. I remember waking up one morning. I had a dream that I was in a stadium and I was in the middle of this stadium and it was empty, and a lightning bolt came and hit the ground. If you can imagine the ricochet of a lightning bolt in an empty stadium and it was hitting the ground. I could feel it through my whole body. I woke up. That was my heartbeat. This is how my mind was translating what I was experiencing. Thank God, eventually, something clicked in me. I said, ‘What am I doing different? There must be something going on. I can’t be sat here feeling like I’m dying’ I’m going to the hospital.”

Tulisa then visited a psychologist and he advised her to go to rehab but she didn’t want to do that because of previous incorrect and untrue allegations about her dealing cocaine. So instead she chose to slowly taper herself off the drugs, which she managed to do over two years and was ‘clean’ of the prescription drugs in January. But it was a challenging time.

She said: “Once I overcame that in January, I didn’t realise how much I had been affected by it and I started to feel alive again. I started to feel me, as a human. I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is reality’. I couldn’t determine anymore what was real and what wasn’t in terms of my anxiety, my depression. I didn’t know what was what. Then it takes so long for your body to get back to normal again and for your nervous system to recover.”

Despite being threatened with prison in the past over untrue media allegations, having had a leaked sex tape and been sexually assaulted when young, Tulisa says the dependence on prescription drugs was “one of the toughest experiences actually in my life”. In some ways she says coming through this period in her life gave her the confidence to then take part in I’m A Celebrity. But once in the Australian camp she did suffer with some of the anxiety, a feeling she had encountered when coming off the sleeping pills.

Tulisa said: “I definitely had an anxiety attack off-camera, because I went to the smoking area to do it and even then, I didn’t want them to know that I was having an anxiety attack, so I was trying to bring down my heart rate, literally through my nose, while I was like, ‘Okay, get the heart rate down. Get the heart rate down’. I wanted to leave that day. I was like, ‘I can’t do this but it’s not what I came here for. I came here to stick it out and do whatever I have to do’.

“And there were lots of amazing moments, really joyful moments, thanks to the people. The people made those moments.”