Emma Stone opens up about being anxious as a child and her interesting coping mechanism
So La La Land star Emma Stone opened up about being anxious as a child. She revealed that she had a “little green monster” driving her crazy, but eventually learned to quiet the voices in her head. Why is it that everything Stone says just makes us love her more?
The 28-year-old actress is the cover star for Rolling Stone’s January issue and she’s getting real, which we’ve come to expect and love about her.
Stone revealed that although her career involves being in the spotlight, as a child she had serious anxiety, proving she is normal and just like us.
"When I was about 7, I was convinced the house was burning down," Stone told Rolling Stone about her anxiety growing up. "I could sense it. Not a hallucination, just a tightening in my chest, feeling I couldn't breath, like the world was going to end."
“There were some flare-ups like that, but my anxiety was constant,” she explained. “I would ask my mom a hundred times how the day was gonna lay out. What time was she gonna drop me off? Where was she gonna be? What would happen at lunch? Feeling nauseous. At a certain point, I couldn’t go to friends’ houses anymore — I could barely get out the door to school.”
The seemingly confident actress did however overcome her anxious feelings with an adorable, and strange, coping mechanism. To combat these feelings, Stone would imagine a “little green monster” sitting on her shoulder telling her, “all these things that aren’t true.”
"And every time I listen to it, it grows bigger. If I listen to it enough, it crushes me," the Arizona native said. "But if I turn my head and keep doing what I'm doing — let it speak to me, but don't give it the credit it needs — then it shrinks down and fades away."
As she got older, Stone began using acting as a way to really be able to stop her anxiety and move past it. She used the fictional worlds to escape in a sense and now she’s one of the most successful actresses of her era.
“You have to be present in improv, and that’s the antithesis of anxiety,” Stone told the publication.
Despite the fact that Stone’s anxiety clearly haunted her as a child, you wouldn’t be able to tell based on her magnificent performances in film over the years. The most recent being La La Land which she is nominated for Best Actress at the Golden Globes for and an Oscar frontrunner.
Not too bad for the little redhead who had to fight off the little green monster all those years!
