The Crown‘s Claire Foy has opened up about her struggle with anxiety.
The actress faced multiple illnesses when growing up as she suffered from juvenile arthritis and also had a benign tumour behind her eye.
The 34-year-old has now opened up about her ongoing battle with anxiety, which began when she was just a teenager.
“When you have anxiety, you have anxiety about – I don’t know – crossing the road. The thing about it is, it’s not related to anything that would seem logical,” the actress told The Guardian.
“It’s purely about that feeling in the pit of your stomach, and the feeling that you can’t, because you’re ‘this’ or you’re ‘that’. It’s my mind working at a thousand beats a second, and running away with a thought,” she continued.
“It was a tool to survive, definitely. To try to hold on to everything. To try to feel safe,” the mother-of-one explained.
“If I knew a day was going to be ruined by anxiety, that was good in a way, because it meant I knew what was going to happen.”
Claire went on to explain that her acting career caused her anxiety to get much worse and stated that it “exploded.”
“I started to learn that the most important thing to do as an actor was not to try to pre-empt everything – to stay in the moment,” she said.
“It’s still there, but I guess I don’t believe it so much any more. I used to think that this was my lot in life, to be anxious. And that I would struggle and struggle and struggle with it, and that it would make me quite miserable, and that I’d always be restricted,” Claire continued.
“But now I’m able to disassociate myself from it more. I know that it’s just something I have – and that I can take care of myself,” she concluded.
Claire recently won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series, for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth in The Crown.
