‘I just thought I was going to drop dead at any moment,’ she recalled of one incident.
Elizabeth Olsen has shared her account of suffering from panic attacks and anxiety, revealing that she learnt how to use ‘brain games’ as a coping mechanism
In a new interview Variety, the 33-year-old said she started experiencing attacks aged 21, when she was living in New York City. The Emmy-nominated actor revealed the attacks happened ‘on the hour every hour’ for a six-month period.
‘I didn’t understand what anxiety or a panic attack was until I was 21. I remember I would get them on the hour every hour,’ she said.
The younger sister of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen went on to explain: ‘I used to live on 13th Street between 6th and 7th.
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‘I was crossing 6th Avenue at 14th Street, and I realised I couldn’t cross the street — I stood up against the wall, and I just thought I was going to drop dead at any moment.
‘If I went from cold to hot, hot to cold, full to hungry, hungry to full — any kind of shift in my body, my whole body thought, ‘Uh oh, something’s wrong!
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The actor said she was introduced to a professional who taught her ‘brain games’ to help her focus.
The Love and Death star compared the coping mechanism to an acting exercise she did at Atlantic Acting School called repetition, explaining: ‘You just are constantly making observations about the person in front of you and you’re just trying to connect.
‘When I would walk down the street, I would just start naming everything I saw out loud to get myself out of the spiralling thoughts in my brain.’
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As for how impactful the ‘games’ were, she said that while they were ‘a helpful tool’, ‘it just became a practice that got me out of it’.
‘I didn’t want to be on medication, but I had medication in case I felt like I was having an emergency and just having that in my bag felt good,’ she continued. ‘It’s very weird because I was not an anxious child. I was very loud and confident.’
Olsen was seemingly able to navigate her anxiety and attacks in private, but the same can’t be said for her twin sisters’ experiences during their teens and twenties when they were in the public eye.
Referring to Mary-Kate, who checked into rehab while suffering from an eating disorder in 2004, Olsen previously said in a 2011 Nylon magazine interview: ‘They turned 18 and what was going on in her life—I’m talking about Mary-Kate—was all over the news.
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‘They would follow us shopping and [Mary-Kate and Ashley] would almost get into car accidents because of the paparazzi, and I didn’t want to be a part of it. I just thought, This is such bulls**t.’
In January earlier this year, a viral video clip, uploaded to Twitter by @itsjustanotherx, showed Olsen defending Mary-Kate and Ashley.
In the footage, a photographer is heard asking Olsen: ‘How come you’re so much nicer than your sisters?’ to which she responds: ‘Because you guys have been bothering them their whole lives.’
The Twitter post, which has received 77.4K likes and 11.5K retweets, was accompanied with a caption that read: ‘Elizabeth Olsen knows how to clear a b**** [sic].’
