Camila Cabello has opened up about her experience with anxiety.
She explained on Time to Walk by Apple Fitness+ how she worked constantly for eight years and it led to her feeling burnt out.
"I had been working pretty nonstop since I was 15. And the rigor with which I started working, there was just no time off," she said.
"I was barely home. I didn't have time to get to know who I was outside of my career.
"Pile that onto struggles with mental health, with anxiety, with these toxic levels of stress, it wasn't even a meltdown because I would just work through it."
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Feeling Unstable
Camila was midway through shooting Cinderella in England when the pandemic began. She returned to America and by the time she was back, she would break down crying daily.
"I definitely felt like I was this freight train going like 90 miles per hour, and then I just halted," Camila said.
"I felt so anxious, cripplingly anxious. I just felt really unstable, and I just felt a mess because suddenly, this thing that was distracting me, my work and filming, was not there."
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Camila found the quietness in her life gave her anxiety the chance to really take hold and affect every area of her life.
Where as before she may have called it performance anxiety, now she was no longer working and came to realise "it's just how I feel."
"I was just left with my anxiety and my mind. And it was getting in the way of my relationship. It was getting in the way of my friendships, my time at home."
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Asking For Help
The pandemic putting pause on her life turned into a silver lining for Camila.
"At that point, I felt like I was running a marathon with a broken leg. I kept going, but it was extremely hard.
"And I wish that I would've just been like, 'Let me just stop for a second and get a nice cast for my broken leg and get some physical therapy.' But I didn't.
"COVID stepped in and kind of did it for me."
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But after years of suffering from anxiety, recovering took a lot of time and effort. Camila said she "definitely asked for help" and gave herself the chance to learn different tools that could help improve mental health.
"I tried a lot of different things, different kinds of therapy, meditation, exercise, changing the way I eat, definitely changing the way I schedule my time and making sure that there's balance.
"I have time for friendships and connection with people and I'm not just nose to the grindstone, not paying attention to my body and my needs."
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What happened next was "life-changing" for Camila. For the first time since she was fifteen, she had the chance "to feel negative emotions without feeling like I had to bury them and perform in five minutes."
She appreciated the time she had to stay in the one place for more than two weeks. "[The time off] gave me the gift of finding new hobbies and other things that soothe me," she said.
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Unlearning Her Independence
"My relationships and my friendships are the things that bring me the most joy," Camila said. But at one point, she felt like her anxiety meant she shouldn't spend time with her friends.
"[I don't need to] feel like until I don't have anxiety and until all these mental health issues are done, I'm not worthy of hanging out with other people and having a social life.
"I think that's what I felt before; that I needed to fix something in myself before letting myself have connections with other people."
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Now that Camila has learned how to lean on others, she accepts that she doesn't have to be completely independent.
"I can rely on other people. I can ask people for help. I can vent to people. I can download and regulate my emotions with other people," she said.
"It doesn't have to be this thing that I have to 'beat' and I have to overcome by myself."
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Well done Camila for being so honest and open!
