Shailene Woodley talks about the debilitating health problems she experienced in her twenties and how intense mental and spiritual work helped her recover.
During a performance at the YOU MD On her podcast, Woodley opened up about some of the frightening symptoms she struggled with as her young career was taking off. “I lost my hearing,” she recalls. “I couldn’t walk for more than five minutes at a time without having to lie down and sleep for hours. Everything I ate hurt my stomach.”
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While Woodley refused to reveal the cause of the symptoms, she said her illness caused her to go from doctor to doctor without receiving a diagnosis. “It was this mixture of problems and diagnoses and different doctors telling me different things,” the Three women the actress explained, adding that she had sought help from both doctors and holistic practitioners.
“I’ve always eaten very healthy and I’m very athletic, so this was a confusing process for me,” Woodley continued. “Why do I pass out every month when I get my period? Why do I have an underactive thyroid? All of these things.”
Woodley recalled that the medical issues led to other problems, such as her body image. “When everything I eat makes me feel sick to my stomach, I suddenly have a fear of food,” Woodley recalled. She also experienced “body dysmorphia and identity confusion,” all of which, she said, were related to an inability to “feel safe in my own shell, in my own skin.”
It took a decade of “relaxing, healing and getting well” to Divergent The actress went on to say she found her way back from the health scare. While the specific medical issues “physically resolved,” Woodley also credits her healing to a lot of inner work. “It forced me to really look deep within myself and get reflective,” Woodley explains. The mental side of the healing process involved “looking at real trauma and real PTSD that I had experienced,” she said. “They definitely took their toll on my body and emotionally.”
Woodley is alluding to the link between physical and mental health that we have only recently begun to appreciate. According to the UK’s Mental Health Foundation, people with mental health problems such as depression are “more likely to suffer from a preventable physical illness such as heart disease.” Depression can also be accompanied by physical symptoms such as headaches, fatigue and digestive problems, while anxiety can lead to upset stomachs and insomnia.
Stress also has a huge impact on physical health. Higher than average levels of cortisol, the hormone that regulates your body’s stress response, can lead to inflammation, high blood pressure and high blood sugar, according to the Mayo Clinic.
Woodley explained that for years she was in a fight-or-flight state – a known response to stress – which may have affected her physical health. Woodley described this state of mind as, “Every single moment was constantly met with high alert and warning flags because I hadn’t figured out what a calm nervous system could look like and what true safety could look like within myself.”
For the actress, healing began from a mental and spiritual place. It was about “really working on my trauma and … acknowledging that I never really felt safe, in myself or in anyone else, because I never knew 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 was my path and my journey to healing.”
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