In an interview with Variety, Elizabeth Olsen spoke candidly about her battles with mental health. When she was 21 and living in New York, she first encountered them. According to the actress, she didn’t even know what anxiety or panic attacks were until she was 21.
The 33-year-old artist admitted that during her early 20s, when living in New York City, she experienced panic attacks “on the hour every hour.”
When Olsen stated that the commencement of her panic attacks astonished her since she had never experienced anxiety as a youngster, she attracted attention to one of the many intricate concerns surrounding mental health.
“It’s strange because I was not a nervous child,” she said. “I was very loud and confident.”
“I recall I would get panic attacks every hour; I used to live on 13th Street between 6th and 7th. I was crossing 6th Avenue at 14th Street, and I realized 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!’ And I just started twisting. It was so weird,” she continued. “An ENT doctor said that it could be vertigo-related because it was all about truly spinning. So it was an interesting six months.”
Olsen also claimed that until she sought the counsel of a friend and a medical expert, she could not discover effective coping techniques for her anxiety and the persistent “spinning” feeling.
