Reese Witherspoon Says a Hypnotist Helped Her ‘High Anxiety’

Reese Witherspoon says she tried meditation and medication to manage life as a “high anxiety person,” but it wasn’t until she found a hypnotist that she discovered tools that “changed my whole life.”

“Can we talk about our relationship to anxiety? Because I wanna hear tools that you’ve learned and what I’ve learned, and it’s real,” The Morning Show star, 49, told hosts Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers on the Sept. 17 episode of their Las Culturistas podcast.

“I’m a high-anxiety person,” Witherspoon said.

“I’m actually really happy to hear you say that… when someone talks about themselves as ambitious — and I identify with that — it’s sort of what people don’t say is the amount of anxiety that sometimes can be driving that ambition,” Rogers replied.

Rogers went on to ask Witherspoon how she thinks of her anxiety, which she described as “it can be really highly performance-based. Like, you have to perform. You have to show up, which is a lot of my anxiety. I used to have panic attacks, bad panic attacks, like crying.” 

She shared ways she tried to manage her anxiety. “I tried meditation,”  she said, adding it’s “hard for me to listen” because “I also have, like, some ADD [the previous medical term for attention deficit disorder, now rolled into the term ADHD] stuff, so I can’t listen to stuff for very long.” 

The Academy Award winner said she tried the medication “Ativan to calm down,” saying, “It would make me feel like a zombie.” 

“I wasn’t performing at the level I wanted to, and I wasn’t as funny,” Witherspoon said, pausing to add, “If you need medicine, please take the medicine … I’m not a doctor.” 

When Witherspoon was 34, she said, “I started doing some work with a hypnotist, and she actually works for this thing called neurolinguistic programming. So, it’s called NLP. And she helped me realize that I was going to get the same result, but I could get rid of all the anxiety in the middle.”

NLP works “to create accessible, understandable ‘tools’ … to improve outcomes, support wellbeing and create change,” according to the Association for NLP.

In Witherspoon’s case, overcoming anxiety took realizing that “I was going to get to the same result, but I could get rid of all the anxiety in the middle.”

“I was like, why am I doing this? I don’t feel good. Or I take an Ativan, and I was sleepy. That actually changed my whole life. And I want people to know anxiety is real.”

“I see girls going through it or guys going through it and they post videos, and … I wanna hug them,” Witherspoon continued. “I want — [it] makes me wanna cry because it’s very real, and you’re not alone, and you can calm yourself down. There’s tools to calm yourself down. “

“The cornerstone of that work is understanding that you’re gonna perform at the same level whether you’re stressed about it or not stressed about it. So decide to take the stress out.” 

Specifically, Witherspoon said she’ll do an exercise “where you talk to yourself after you’ve completed the task. You’ve done this show. You’re walking backstage … and you’re happy. And so, you kind of just tell yourself ahead of time, we’re gonna get there. The way I process it is actually who I am and how I show up as a leader. “

“At what point do you believe that to be true? That, like, you don’t need all the stuff in the middle? That you will perform at the same level“ Yang asked, adding that he just assumes the “anxiety and the stress is just the way through.”

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“When you can let the compliments in,” Witherspoon said. “Just sit down at the end of the night, maybe even, like, just circle certain texts or take a screenshot, and like give yourself a moment and let it in.”

As she told Yang, “Because you really are that talented. And you really, really deserve where you’re at.”

Witherspoon stars in The Morning Show‘s fourth season, which debuted on Apple TV+ on Sept. 17.

If you or someone you know needs mental health help, text “STRENGTH” to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 to be connected to a certified crisis counselor.