Simon Cowell recently opened up about the "downward spiral" he was experiencing after the death of his parents and how the birth of his son saved him. While appearing on an episode of "The Diary Of A CEO" podcast, Cowell shared how his 10-year-old son saved him from a dark time in his life after the loss of both of his parents. Simon's father, Eric, whom Simon's son is now named after, passed away in 1999 while his mother Julie passed away in 2015. “I think particularly when I lost my mum, I was on a downward spiral at that point,” said the "America's Got Talent" judge. “I lost everyone, you know, I’ve lost my parents. It’s finality now. What I said about the material things I’ve got, everything just meant nothing at that point.” He continued, “I was desperately unhappy, I wasn’t particularly enjoying my work and I just thought you know what I’m just going to become a vampire then, and I would work through until 7:00 or 8:00 in the morning. I would wake up at 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon and I actually got addicted to that kind of lifestyle. I just loved the intensity. It was almost like because of the loss I’d had, I’ve got to find something else to fill it. And it was I’m just going to be a ridiculous workaholic, and I was very successful but I wasn’t happy, I really, really wasn’t happy.”

When Cowell heard that his fiancée, Lauren Silverman was pregnant, everything turned around. “When I got the call from Lauren, which starts, any call that starts with, ‘Are you sitting down?’ You know what‘s coming next. It was like, ‘Are you sitting down?’ ‘Yes,’ ‘Well,’ and she told me. And yes it did absolutely change, it changed everything in my life. It made me happy again,” Cowell said. “For me, it was perfect because like we were talking earlier about our childhoods, it was brilliant. Fantastic. I remember the first time I watched Jungle Book [with him] and I’m looking over and seeing the joy he had watching that movie. It was like, oh my God I remember how I felt when I saw The Jungle Book," he continued. When the podcast host, Steven Bartlett, asked Cowell if his son Eric "saved" him, Cowell said, “Without question, without question. I really, really had reached the point where nothing mattered. Even to the point that I almost can’t remember everything from that period." He continued, "It hit me so hard, the hardest thing also was being on television as well … I felt like a clown here because I’m dying inside," he said. "And yet I’ve still got to do what I’m being paid to do as best as I could but I’d put on a ton of weight, I was eating junk, if I had got hit by a bus the following day, well, I’d be dead, but I wasn’t worried about anything like that.”