Emma Stone Says Acting Helped Refocus Her Childhood Anxiety: ‘Kind of a Superpower’

Emma Stone has a positive effect on her anxiety.

In a new interview with National Public Radio (NPR) published Wednesday, Poor people actress, 35, opened up about her childhood angst, saying that while it was hard to deal with at first, she found a way to push through it.

“I started therapy, I think around age 8, because it became very difficult for me to leave the house to go to school,” Stone told NPR. “I kind of lived in fear of those panic attacks.”

The actress, who said she had her first panic attack when she was 7, added that she believes the source of her anxiety when she was younger stemmed from the fear of being separated from her mother. She noted, “it’s a difficult age to be able to reason with yourself, at 7 or 8 years old, and tell yourself that these things are not true. … It was very difficult to convince myself otherwise.”

How Emma Stone — who struggles with anxiety — is working to break the stigma of mental health disorders

Emmy Stone at the SAG-AFTRA Foundation Conversations event on January 25 in New York.

Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images

However, all that changed when Stone started acting at the age of 11. The actress said the skill gave her a way to focus on the moment without worrying about what happened before or what will happen later. She told the outlet that as an actress, “all my big feelings are productive and presence is necessary.”

Those experiences changed the way she now thinks about anxiety, Stone said. She told NPR that she thinks it can be a positive thing if people know what to do with it.

Emma Stone on anxiety and panic attacks that ‘still haunt me’

“I’ve told a lot of younger people who struggle with anxiety, that in many ways I see it as a kind of superpower,” Stone said. “Just because we might have a funny thing going on in our amygdala, and our fight-or-flight response might be a little off compared to a lot of people’s brain chemistry, that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. That doesn’t make it bad.”

“It just means we have these management tools,” she continued. “And if you can use that for productive things, if you can use all those feelings in those synapses that trigger for something creative, or something you’re passionate about, or something interesting.”

Stone said, “Anxiety is like rocket fuel because you can’t help but get out of bed and do things, do things, do things because you have all this energy inside of you. And that’s really a gift.”

Emmy Stone at the SAG-AFTRA Foundation Conversations event on January 25 in New York.

Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images

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The Super bad the actress has been speaking openly about her struggle with anxiety and panic attacks for several years. Stone said in 2018 that improv has taught her to “take all these big feelings and really listen in the moment and use all of your associative brain”. This anxiety helped her better understand the emotions of her characters.

“I also believe there’s a lot of empathy when you’ve struggled a lot on the inside,” she said. “There’s a tendency to want to understand how the people around you work or what’s going on with them internally, which is great for the characters.”

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Source: HIS Education