Millie Bobby Brown shared how her mental health was destroyed by a traumatic incident where she was ‘chased’.
The 22-year-old Enola Holmes star explained that she ‘shut down’ for three months after the encounter, meditating with monks to cope.
Millie, who is best known for playing Eleven in Stranger Things, revealed she suffers from long stretches of anxiety rather than short bursts.
Speaking on the Jay Shetty podcast, On Purpose, she said: ‘My anxiety doesn’t come on a Monday and maybe a Wednesday.
‘Something big needs to happen and then it will probably last for two months, every day. So mine are cycles.
‘One of my longest cycles must have been three months, and I got chased by somebody in a place, and it sent me into a three-month-long anxiety panic attack.’
The actress added: ‘I got chased by these people and it was really traumatising. It was very, very intense and very scary. I shut down for three months.’
It was only after a trip to Japan that she was able to shake the anxiety cycle, wanting to ‘heal’ before she started her family.
Millie and Jake Bongiovi – rocker Jon Bon Jovi’s son – got married last year and later announced in August that they had adopted a baby girl.
They’ve kept their family life fairly private, with the actress who now goes by Millie Bonnie Bongiovi describing motherhood as a ‘beautiful, amazing journey’.
‘Anxiety is the worst thing ever and I knew I needed to heal and I needed to figure out my anxiety before starting a family. I needed to understand what was happening,’ she said.
‘It was the most amazing experience. It took me out of the cycle.’
Millie said, looking at old red carpet moments, she can see that she was having a ‘full-blown panic attack’ but was unable to escape it.
Now, she has healthier coping mechanisms and tools to break the mindset as it happens, rather than spiralling for months.
She continued: ‘Meditation has never been anything that’s worked for me because of my mind and how I’ve not been able to shut out thoughts.
‘Nobody knew who I was, and if they did, they didn’t care in that moment. It was amazing and I will never forget the feeling.
‘I do think that I’m a big believer in divine intervention, and I think that was a moment where God was like, you need to take a break and you need to sit there and figure out what’s going on in your head.
‘I think that really healed me in a lot of ways. It healed a lot of me.’
Millie previously shared that she believes in past lives, more specifically that she was once a closeted gay soldier who met a gruesome end after being killed with a sword through the spine.
Her Enola Holmes 3 co-star Louis Partridge wasn’t so convinced, saying he doesn’t believe in past lives at all, to Millie’s disappointment.