Shailene Woodley is speaking out about the debilitating health issues she experienced in her twenties and how doing intense mental and spiritual work helped her find her way back to wellness.
While Woodley declined to reveal the cause of the symptoms, she said the illness sent her from doctor to doctor without getting a diagnosis. “It was this conflation of issues and diagnoses and different doctors telling me different things,” the Three Women actor explained, adding that she sought help from medical doctors as well as holistic practitioners.
“I’ve always eaten very healthy and I’m very athletic and so it was a confusing process for me,” Woodley went on. “Why am I passing out every month when I get my period? Why am I hypothyroid? All of these things.”
Woodley recalled that the medical issues were leading to other issues, such as with body image. “If everything I’m eating hurts my stomach, I’m now suddenly afraid of food,” Woodley remembered thinking. She also experienced “body dysmorphia and confusion of identity,” all of which, she said had to do with an inability to “feel safe in my own capsule, in my own skin.”
It took a decade of “unwinding and healing and getting healthy,” the Divergent actor went on, for her to find her way back from the health scare. While the specific medical issues “physically resolved” themselves, Woodley also credits her healing to a lot of inner work. “It forced me to really take a deep look and become introspective,” Woodley explains. The mental side of the healing process involved “looking at real traumas and real PTSD that I had experienced,” she said. “They definitely took a toll on my body and took a toll emotionally.”
Woodley is alluding to the connection between physical and mental health, which we’ve only recently begun to fully appreciate. Per the UK’s Mental Health Foundation, people with mental health problems like depression are “more likely to have a preventable physical health condition such as heart disease.” Depression can also come with physical symptoms like headaches, fatigue, and digestive issues, while anxiety can lead to stomach upset and insomnia.
Stress also affects physical health in a very real way. Higher-than-normal levels of cortisol, the hormone that regulates your body’s stress response, can lead to inflammation, high blood pressure, and high blood sugar, per Mayo Clinic.
Woodley explained that she’d been in a state of fight or flight — a well-known reaction to stress — for years, which may have affected her physical health. Describing that headspace, Woodley said she was “constantly approaching every single moment with high alert and with red flags because I hadn’t yet established what a calm nervous system could look like and what true safety in myself could look like.”
For the actor, healing started in a mental and spiritual place. It involved “truly working on my trauma and … acknowledging that I’ve never really felt safe with myself or with anyone else because I never knew that I could be safe, that that was an option,” she said. “Diving into the mental health aspects of that and then therapy and a lot of discipline has been my path and my journey to healing.”
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