He said: "I'm just being a normal person and crying. When I'm in the media and I look at things on the internet and people are like, 'Justin's upset, why is he upset?' It's like, they don't give me permission to be upset. I don't have permission to be, you know, human and shed tears. There's so many people every day who are in a conversation with their girl or their wife or their mom and they break down, you know? But they don't have cameras capturing it. So people are like, 'Is he OK, is he having a mental breakdown?' And I'm just emotional ... and that's OK."
Bieber can also feel "overwhelmed" and "frustrated" at times.
Referring to another occasion in 2018 when he looked emotional during a day out with his wife Hailey Bieber, he said: "I remember just struggling. I remember feeling, like, emotionally, just overwhelmed and talking to her, not knowing how to communicate certain things and just feeling kind of, like, frustrated. You know, there's been a lot of things that have happened in my life and, um, I think this was a point in my life where I was just like, so overwhelmed."