'I sit there and I look back and I'm like, "I'm a smart person. What the hell was I thinking?"' Britney Spears said in an interview to air on MTV on Nov. 30, two days before the release of her new album.

'I've been through a lot in the past two or three years, and there's a lot that people don't know.'
'Sometimes I think I get kind of lonely because you don't open the gate up that much, you know I mean?'

"You're guarded. You have to be that way, so I'm kind of stuck in this place and it's like: How do you deal? And you just cope, and that's what I do. I just cope with it, every day.'