Emma Stone explains why she thinks anxiety is ‘selfish condition’

Emma Stone has shared her candid take on why she thinks that anxiety is a “selfish condition”.

The 35-year-old actor opened up about her own challenges with the mental health condition during an interview with Variety, published on 21 February. While discussing some personality traits about her character, Bella Baxter, in Poor Things, she acknowledged how the film shows “the idea of not living with that self-judgement or shame”.

She then expressed how that perspective is different from the feelings of anxiety that she’s had, before detailing why she believes that the mental health conditions is a “selfish” one.

“And part of the nature of anxiety is that you’re always watching yourself. In some ways – this is horrible to say – it’s a very selfish condition to have,” she said. “Not to insult other people with anxiety – I still have it – but it’s because you’re thinking about yourself a lot.”

She went on to describe some of the ways in which she questions herself throughout her battles with anxiety. “You’re thinking about, ‘What’s going to happen to me? What have I said? What have I done?’” she added.

Stone continued to detail how her character in Poor Things has a different outlook on everyday life, explaining: “Whereas Bella’s way of approaching the world, it’s just about experience. It’s just about how she feels about things.”

While the La La Land star believes that anxiety is a selfish thing to have, her comments come as she spoke candidly about struggling with the conditon herself. Speaking with pal Jennifer Lawrence in 2018 for an interview with Elle, Stone revealed that she first struggled with panic attacks at the age of seven and used acting as an outlet to cope.

“My mom always says that I was born with my nerves outside of my body,” she said. “But I’m lucky for the anxiety, because it also makes me high-energy.”

During the conversation, Stone also specified that she refrains from using social media, for the sake of her mental health. “I think it wouldn’t be a positive thing for me,” she said. “If people can handle that sort of output and input in the social media sphere, power to them.”

While speaking to NPR last month, Stone shared her candid perspective about her anxiety and how she now sees it as “a superpower”.

“Just because we might have a funny thing going on in our amygdala, and our fight-or-flight response is maybe a little bit out of whack in comparison to many people’s brain chemistry, it doesn’t make it wrong,” she explained. “It doesn’t make it bad. It just means we have these tools to manage.”

She continued to tell people who struggle with anxiety that they can use those feelings for “productive things”.

“If you can use all of those feelings in those synapses that are firing for something creative, or something that you’re passionate about, or something interesting, anxiety is like rocket fuel because you can’t help but get out of bed and do things, do things, do things because you’ve got all of this energy within you,” she concluded. “And that’s really a gift.”