Emma Stone Thought Her Anxiety Would Keep Her from Moving Away from Home

Emma Stone is one of the most successful actresses of her generation—she took home the Academy Award for Best Actress this year for her role in La La Land. But there was a time in her life when she thought she’d never make it to Hollywood because of her crippling anxiety.

In a new campaign with the Child Mind Institute, a nonprofit for children with mental health and learning disorders, Stone gets candid about her own struggles with mental health issues and reveals what she would tell her younger self.

“What I would tell my younger self about having anxiety is that life goes in stages and it has always been something that I’ve lived with and that flares up in big ways in different times in my life. But sometimes while it’s happening, like when I’m in a phase of real turmoil, the anxiety is very strong, it feels like it’s never going to end, and it does,” she says in the video at top.

“I mean, it ebbs and flows in such a way that as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned how to manage it with so many tools. There are so many tools you can learn for it that have lead to me living a pretty normal and exciting and vibrant life, which I truly as a kid did not think I would be able to ever move away from home or be apart from people that I had separation anxiety with.”

“I’ve been able to manage that with great therapists and with great, basically cognitive behavioral tools, you know, meditation and lots of things. It’s so nice to know in those moments of real intensity that it will shift and it will change and there’s a lot I can do to help myself,” she said.

From royals to Academy Award winners, it’s refreshing to see these big stars reducing the stigma surrounding mental health issues—one conversation at a time.