Simon Cowell credits his son for saving him amid 'downward spiral' from his mother's death

The TV personality shares 10-year-old Eric with fiancée Lauren Silverman.

Simon Cowell looked back on the death of his mother, calling it the darkest period of his life.

On the latest episode of the Diary of a CEO podcast, the America's Got Talent judge, 64, recalled the heartache of losing his mother Julie in 2015, after having already lost his father Eric in 1999. "I was on a downward spiral at that point,” Cowell said. "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.”

Related: Simon Cowell leaves other judges howling when he breaks America's Got Talent Golden rule

Cowell was "desperately unhappy," he recalled. "I wasn’t particularly enjoying my work and I just thought, you know what? I’m just going to become a vampire. And I would work through until 7 or 8 in the morning. I would wake up at 2 or 3 in the afternoon and I 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."

Cowell said of the distraction, "I’m just going to be a ridiculous workaholic. I was very successful but I wasn’t happy, I really, really wasn’t happy.”

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Life took a turn when his longtime partner and fiancée Lauren Silverman learned she was pregnant. "It changed everything in my life. It made me happy again," Cowell said. When asked if his son Eric, named after his late father, had saved him, Cowell said, “Without question. I really had reached the point where nothing mattered. Even to the point that I almost can’t remember everything from that period."

The hardest part of that period, Cowell said, was having to be on television. "I felt like a clown because I’m dying inside, and yet I’ve still got to do what I’m being paid to do as best as I could," he recalled. "I’d put on a ton of weight, I was eating junk. If I had got hit by a bus the following day, I’d be dead, but I wasn’t worried about anything like that.”

Related: X Factor alum Lucy Spraggan says Simon Cowell will walk her down the aisle: 'Simon really cares'

Elsewhere in the interview, Cowell spoke about One Direction and the one regret about his time managing the band ("I should have kept the name") and breaking his back during a 2020 biking accident. Watch for more above.

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