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Whether you’re facing tightening restriction or lockdowns (hello Australia), the world is experiencing a whole new wave of anxiety. In a cover interview for InStyle, Jennifer Aniston revealed her own struggles with mental health and how she used quarantine to address it.
“There was so much good and so much horror all happening at once. For me, the good was a big decompression and an inventory of ‘What’s it all about?'” the actress told the publication. “Being idle is not preferable. It was important for those who were willing to let it be a reset to slowdown, take all of this in, reassess, reevaluate, and excavate. Literally cleaning out crap that we don’t need.”
Without the burgeoning spotlight and time to sit still, she also took time to cut toxicity from her life including relationships and lifestyles that were no longer serving her. Aniston also credited therapy for assisting her to continue in the cutthroat film industry.
“My level of anxiety has gone down by eliminating the unnecessary sort of fat in life that I had thought was necessary,” she said. “Also realising that you can’t please everybody.”
Aniston continued, “A wonderful amount of trying to understand it. Also, being given examples of what I do not want to become, seeing people I love get lost and lose the plot.”
It’s of course not a new phenomenon to ‘work on yourself’ in lockdown or use restrictions as a tool to ‘slow down’. By now many of us are tired and fatigued of the rapid changes. But perhaps it should serve as a gentle reminder to be kind to yourself and others.
The actress also took the opportunity to touch on how the media shaped herself and other young women of fame in the ’90s and early noughts, noting in particular Britney Spears’ treatment at the hand of gossip publications.
“[They were] feeding on young, impressionable girls. Half of these kids started on The Mickey Mouse Club. I was lucky enough to be raised by a very strict mother. The priorities were not about becoming a famous person,” Aniston says of her own upbringing. “I think that [Spears’s] group of girls as teens didn’t have any kind of “Who am I?” They were being defined by this outside source. The media took advantage of that, capitalized on them, and it ultimately cost them their sanity. It’s so heartbreaking.”
