The actress Anne Hathaway (41) usually appears relaxed and in a good mood when she appears. But it wasn’t always like that: In a podcast she now talked about how stressed she used to be. However, she has now realized that stress in life is not worth it. That’s why she’s doing things differently now.
As the 41-year-old has gotten older, she has become more and more relaxed. While reflecting on the roles she played early in her career on The New York Times podcast The Interview, the The Devil Wears Prada actress said she often played “chronically stressed young women” because she was like that was. “I was a really stressed out young woman.” However, this condition leads you “to all sorts of things” and she realized that she didn’t want to die stressed. Life is too short for that: “Something could fall from the sky and turn off your light.”
She thought her life had to be like that – and didn’t pay enough attention to herself. “I didn’t know how to breathe yet,” said the mother of two. “And that was really complicated. It was really, really complicated not knowing how to breathe.” That’s why “literally everything” in her life as a young woman in Hollywood stressed her out at some point.
Hathaway went on to say that she even felt “somatic” stress at the time, i.e. effects on her body. That’s probably why she started consuming alcohol regularly to cope with her constant stress. “For me it was like a smoldering fuel,” she explained on the subject of alcohol in an interview with Vanity Fair magazine just a few weeks ago. Deep down she knew “that it wasn’t for me.” She has now given up drinking for five years and has vowed to abstain from alcohol for as long as her sons live with her.
Instead of fighting stress with alcohol, she now tries to apply a more positive outlook on life. Not only can you breathe away stressful situations with the right technique, but you can also practice gratitude more often. “A light lit up in her head” when she realized that she didn’t have to be hard on herself to achieve something in life.
