Reese Witherspoon credits a hypnotist for “changing [her] life” and helping her to overcome anxiety.
Reese Witherspoon credits a hypnotist for helping her to overcome anxiety.
The Morning Show actress admitted she has always been a “high anxiety person” and after meditation and medication didn’t help to ease her stress and panic attacks but neither had the result she was looking for.
Speaking to Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers on their Las Culturistas podcast, she said: “I’m a high-anxiety person… It can be really highly performance-based. Like, you have to perform. You have to show up, which is a lot of my anxiety. I used to have panic attacks, bad panic attacks, like crying.
“I tried meditation [but] it’s hard for me to listen because I also have, like, some ADD stuff, so I can’t listen to stuff for very long.
“[I tried]Ativan to calm down. It would make me feel like a zombie. I wasn’t performing at the level I wanted to, and I wasn’t as funny.
“If you need medicine, please take the medicine … I’m not a doctor.”
When she was 34, Reese then turned to a hypnotist who introduced her to neurolistic programming (NLP), which works to ” create accessible, understandable ‘tools’” in order to “to improve outcomes, support wellbeing and create change.”
She said: “She helped me realise that I was going to get the same result, but I could get rid of all the anxiety in the middle..
“I was like, why am I doing this? I don’t feel good. Or I take an Ativan, and I was sleepy. That actually changed my whole life. And I want people to know anxiety is real.
“I see girls going through it or guys going through it and they post videos, and … I wanna hug them. I want — [it] makes me wanna cry because it’s very real, and you’re not alone, and you can calm yourself down. There’s tools to calm yourself down.
“The cornerstone of that work is understanding that you’re gonna perform at the same level whether you’re stressed about it or not stressed about it. So decide to take the stress out.”
The Cruel Intentions actress explained one exercise involved having to “talk to yourself after you’ve completed the task.”
She explained: “‘You’ve done this show. You’re walking backstage … and you’re happy.’ And so, you kind of just tell yourself ahead of time, we’re gonna get there. The way I process it is actually who I am and how I show up as a leader.
Bowen asked:“At what point do you believe that to be true? That, like, you don’t need all the stuff in the middle? That you will perform at the same level?”
His guest replied: “When you can let the compliments in. Just sit down at the end of the night, maybe even, like, just circle certain texts or take a screenshot, and like give yourself a moment and let it in.
“Because you really are that talented. And you really, really deserve where you’re at.”
Reese Witherspoon credits hypnotist for changing her life
