Shailene Woodley is opening up about a debilitating health scare she endured in her early 20s and how she had to address her past trauma to let herself heal. Appearing on Tuesday’s episode of the “SHE MD” podcast, the star, 32, told hosts Mary Alice Haney and Dr. Thais Aliabadi about the trouble she had trying to figure out the cause of her crushing mystery illness and how it led her to some revelations about her mental health.
“I was losing my hearing. I couldn’t walk for longer than five minutes at a time without having to lay down for hours and hours and hours and sleep,” she told the hosts. “Everything I ate hurt my stomach.
” While Woodley opted to keep her exact diagnosis private, telling the hosts the her health status “feels like a personal thing,” she said she was overwhelmed by the amount of “mixed information” doctors offered when she sought out help. “It was this conflation of issues and diagnoses and different doctors telling me different things,” the “Big Little Lies” actor said, noting how it took her nearly a decade to understand what exactly was happening. Woodley told the hosts how her symptoms unleashed a world of “mental fuckery” into her life, and described how her physical pain impacted the way she behaved and thought.
“Throughout that decade, a lot of other things came from feeling so much discomfort physically,” she went on. “Like, oh my gosh, if everything hurts my stomach, I’m now suddenly afraid of food.”.