Today Anne Hathaway may appear to have it all—a beautiful family, a booming career complete with an Oscar, and a bonafide sense of style— but that doesn’t mean her life wasn’t without its hurdles. In a discussion with The New York Times Magazine for the debut episode of its new podcast “The Interview,” the actress opened up about the chronic anxiety she experienced early in her career and how she finally moved past her fears.
“As a formerly chronically stressed young woman, I just remember thinking one day, ‘You are taking this for granted. You are taking your life for granted. You have no idea. Something could fall through the sky, and that would be lights out,'” she remembered telling herself. “So when I find the old instincts rising, I just tell myself, ‘You are not going to die stressed,'” she said, adding, “I didn’t know how to breathe yet. That was really complicated.”
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As for what caused her so much stress and anxiety as a young actress, Hathaway replied: “The simple answer is literally everything. I was very in my head about a lot of things.” She further explained, “I was just stuck in this feeling. It’s that thing about, I want to achieve things, I want to grow, and you think, mistakenly, that the way you do that is to be really hard on yourself. You drive yourself by self-criticism.”
The Oscar-winner, who first found fame with The Princess Diaries in 2001, revealed how she was able to change her mindset years later. “I won’t go into the specifics, but there was a moment in which I realized that in order to keep that narrative alive, I was going to have to deny so much,” she stated. “I just said: ‘You’re just going to have to accept that if nothing else happens to you, you’ve had a really great life. You have been given gifts and opportunities. And for you to continue to walk on this path, not being grateful, I don’t think that’s really who you are.’ It felt like a light went on.”
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Now in her 40s, Hathaway said her goal is “to heal” her anxiety and “not relive it.” She continued, “I don’t spend a great deal of time thinking about it because I feel that I found a window and I climbed through it. I work hard to just be present. Like I said, I’m more grateful. I’m more settled in myself. I’m less afraid of things not happening.”