Ellie Goulding thought she was going to die during a severe panic attack

She said: "I was on a train, going to my friend's dad's funeral, sadly, and I was going back through where I grew up and I remembered the old person that I was and it hadn't caught up with this new person that I was trying to make myself as a recording artist, and I think it just completely crashed.

"And just at that moment the train broke down and it was just this coming together of things where it came out in this massive panic of, well I was sweating, and my heart was pounding and I was having palpitations and I had these feelings of dread – which made me think I'm going to die.

"I was like, 'Is this death? Is this dying?', because that's how severe it was as a physical reaction."

The 34-year-old singer thinks it is something she has developed as she gets older.

Speaking to Frankie Bridge on the Open Mind podcast, she added: "I don't remember having it when I was younger. It's possible that I did. I just maybe didn't interpret it in the right way or I thought that was just who I was; whereas I've been able to unpick things a lot more now as I get older.

"I think the first time that it became a physical thing was when I started out in music and it all happened so bloody quickly that I couldn't catch up with what was going on … "My brain couldn't catch up with my body or the other way around."