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Shailene Woodley elaborated on a “personal” health struggle she went through in her early 20s this week.
The “Ferrari” actress, 32, said while she was filming 2014’s “Divergent” her health began to deteriorate to the point where she could hardly walk, eat or hear.
“I haven’t spoken about exactly what it was because that just feels like a personal thing that I don’t need to disclose,” she told Dear Media’s “SHE MD” podcast hosts Dr. Thais Alialabi and Mary Alice Haney, “but essentially I was in a position in my early 20s, it got to the point where I was losing my hearing. I couldn’t walk for longer than five minutes at a time without having to lay down for hours and hours and hours and sleep. Everything I ate hurt my stomach. It was this conflation of issues and diagnoses and different doctors telling me different things.”
She said because she “comes from a very holistic background” and studied herbalism, she decided to work with “real MDs” and “independent healers” in “just trying to search for some sense of comfort in my own skin.”
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Shailene Woodley elaborated on a “personal” health struggle she went through in her early 20s this week. (Jemal Countess/Getty Images for TIME)
“And it was a long journey, about a decade of unwinding and healing and getting healthy, and throughout that decade a lot of other things came from feeling so much discomfort, which was ‘My God, if everything I’m eating hurts my stomach, I’m now suddenly afraid of food.’ And then going into the kind of mental f—–y that can happen with that of body dysmorphia and confusion about, you know, identity in feeling safe in my own capsule, in my own skin and what that meant and what that should be.”
She said the ailment ultimately physically “resolved itself” and she’s now “very healthy.”
“I’m so happy to be able to say that,” she confessed.
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Woodley starred as Tris in “Divergent,” about a woman who realizes she doesn’t fit in a dystopian world and her life is in danger. She made two other movies in the series: “Insurgent” and “Allegiant” in 2015 and 2016.
Woodley told the podcast hosts that her health journey forced her to become more “introspective.”
Woodley said her health journey forced her to become more “introspective.” (JC Olivera/FilmMagic/Getty Images)
“That I guess was the path for me along with the physical healing was acknowledging the mental side of the healing process for myself, which involved looking at real traumas and real PTSD that I had experienced at various times in my life without going into detail about what they were,” Woodey explained.
She said those traumas “definitely took a toll on my body and took a toll, I think, emotionally, which then got stuck in my body and affected me, and I’ve always eaten very healthily and I’m very athletic, so it was a confusing process for me to go ‘What am I doing wrong? Why am I passing out every month when I get my period? Why am I hypothyroid? Why am I all of these things?’”
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The “Ferrari” actress, 32, said while she was filming 2014’s “Divergent” her health began to deteriorate to the point where she could hardly walk, eat or hear. (Corine Solberg/Getty Images)
Various doctors had suggested she had endometriosis, a tilted uterus or a heart-shaped uterus, she said.
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“Every person I went to was giving me mixed information, and it sent me on my own journey of I kind of, what you just said, I don’t feel safe with any of these people that are guiding me ‘cause I feel like they actually are figuring it out along the way as well, and so I might as well take this into my own hands and devote myself to educating myself about so many subjects and approaching it from an internal holistic place.”
Woodley said she’s no longer on thyroid or any other medication anymore.
“My hormones are so balanced, and everything is pumping in the way that it should,” she added. “And I believe ultimately the thing that led me there alongside again the physical aspects was acknowledging that I was in a constant state of fight or flight.
“My nervous system was super sympathetic and very much operating from a place of fear and a place of ‘Where’s the lion in the room?’ 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. And once I focused on that and really became devotional and disciplined in that practice, physically everything began to change and balanced out for me.”
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She explained later that when there’s an obstacle in her life she tends to “run headfirst towards it, but in the past I would run towards it with a lack of awareness about needing to make sure I was OK in the process.”
