breathin

Ariana Grande had some incredibly stressful experiences in 2017, most notably the deadly terrorist attack that killed 22 concertgoers outside of her Dangerous concert in Manchester, England. The songstress told Time magazine she was having lots of anxiety attacks after she'd completed her Dangerous Woman tour. "I've always had anxiety," Grande said. "I've never really spoken about it because I thought everyone had it, but when I got home from tour it was the most severe I think it's ever been." Grande penned this pounding anthem about her anxiety attacks. "You know when you feel like you can't get a full breath? It's like the worst feeling in the world," Grande told TV host Jimmy Fallon. "So it's a song about that feeling."

Grande wrote the track when she had an anxiety attack while in the studio with American songwriter Savan Kotecha and Swedes Ilya and Peter Svensson. She recalled: "We were in the studio, we were writing and I was like, 'Ugh can't breathe.' And they were like, 'We're going to write this song.' And I was like, 'OK, I still can't breathe, but we'll write it.'"

Savan Kotecha told Billboard that he and the other songwriters wrote the song with Grande when she was "having one of those days where things are too much." He added that she "wrote this honest lyric about how she was feeling in that moment and it became what it was."