Kristen Bell on Living with Depression and Anxiety | Body Stories | SELF

I have to know how my brain works to prevent it from doing bad things because the brain is very deceptive and will tell you things that are not true and therefore knowing that I would remember a negative experience more than I would. I remember something positive. My mission would really be to do well, but the positive experiences with that person were the same. I am going to choose to let go of that negative experience. It's hard to put into words honestly and it feels different at different times when my

anxiety

. It's high, it feels like a complete inability to make decisions like you'd rather not do something and then decide what to do and it's almost paralyzing, which is strange because it seems simple: do you want to go for a walk or sit on the couch and watch TV and think?

I can't understand that. I don't have the brain power. It feels like decision fatigue and then

depression

is different. My version feels very restricted, like you're trying to put. put on like a latex glove that's too small for your hand and also matches this feeling of not being excited about anything that again, on a day when you feel great or even normal, you can get excited about things like you're saying oh I'm going I'm going to eat pizza today or I'm going to see a friend today or I'm talking about all the fun things in life and when I'm depressed it's like none of those things are exciting or seem worth it, so there's a real disconnect. because I know that, logically, it should be a feeling that induces some happiness, but it's like my

depression

doesn't allow me to recognize those feelings at 40.

I no longer like to believe that nothing should be taboo, like when I talked to my children about sex and yes, them. We're very young but they wanted to know how they got here and we talked about it and they were disgusted and left the room and that's fine, but I think anything that's taboo and hard to talk about should be one of the first priorities you should have. be talking to the support systems in your life I wish I had been known as a person in the public eye to talk about it publicly at an earlier date.

I had been acting and you know, doing advertising for a while and I was in the home stretch. the last two film part of a press tour and I had done all these interviews and I was lying in bed about to do Sam Jones, which is a long interview like it's a 45 minute to an hour session so you can better be prepared to speak well and I told my husband God I have nothing to talk about I feel exhausted like I have told all the

stories

of my life and he said why don't you talk about your struggle with

anxiety

and depression? like it was a huge light bulb, I thought, I've never, ever, I was experiencing the same thing as everyone else, which is to say, well, just don't talk about it and then I felt so inauthentic and irresponsible for doing it.

I've been presenting this person as a happy, bubbly person, who is someone who I cultivate and care for and try really hard to exist as um and I just wasn't being honest with people like girls who can look up to me, so I thought Okay. , I'm just going to talk about it and I don't even think Sam knew it, but during that interview I thought, "Actually, you know, during a period of my life and periods and often, and sometimes just on a random Wednesday, I feel this." way and then we started to dig deeper and I was very happy to admit it all and the response I got from that interview was amazing to me as so many people were saying that I felt that way too, thank you for saying it out loud, you gave me the courage to say it out loud, which I mean, I did pretty much nothing except do what I was supposed to do, which is be honest and authentic, and it really was a big turning point in my life.

I just felt a great sense of responsibility, um, so I kept talking about it and I talk about it a lot and here we are. I started noticing a feeling of being disconnected when I was probably 18 or 19 years old. I moved from Detroit to New York when I just turned 18. I was like two weeks away from turning 18. And I was so excited that it was all I wanted to do. I was going to nyu. I was studying musical theater. I was

living

in this beautiful cultural city like a melting pot. watching, you know, Broadway shows every night and it was wonderful and I felt like if I wrote my life down on paper, I would have so many opportunities, so many privileges, so much access to happiness and yet my feelings weren't those when I was 18 years old. . old woman

living

alone in new york city I should say yes, it should be so exciting but it wasn't, I felt like I was being followed by a strange dark cloud that just didn't allow me to see all the happiness. around me and I was lucky to feel in my bones that this wasn't how I hate to use the word should but I should feel or how I could feel, I guess, and I was lucky that my mom had sat me down.

She sat down and had a conversation with me and she said, Hey, just a quick heads up. I experience these feelings. Sometimes your grandmother experienced these feelings. She's a nurse sometimes, so she acknowledged there could be a hereditary component to a serotonin imbalance and said if you start to feel any of these things, just know that there are a variety of ways you can approach people or treat to solve it and you don't have to live like that, it's something as difficult to talk about as I am. I don't like that there's any kind of stigma to it, but I get it, it's a strange thing to talk about because it's not an affliction that you can see, I guess it's something that's hard to diagnose and also hard to recognize, and a lot of families or systems support person or anyone in their life who doesn't know how to talk about it, especially if they don't feel it themselves, I think I had the advantage because my mom had explained it to me in a very medical way from the beginning and I was like, oh, okay, you kind of armed me with the information about what could happen and may never happen, but if it did happen, there is access to help.

I knew there were all these ways, like talking to a friend, finding a therapist, talking to a psychiatrist or psychologist and just knowing that changed everything for me, even if you're not experiencing any mental health issues, I hope you walk through life being open and ready to be a shoulder if someone needs you because the reality is that we are not all born equal, some of us are born very confident and then some are born very shy and I feel like maybe this is just my maternal instinct speaking but no I want no one to feel like they don't have a support system, so if we collectively as a society are into

self

-care, this whole idea should also include caring about each other.

You know, obviously it has to be the person who identifies the feeling and says I need help, but then I think. It has to fall to the people around them who love them to say, "Okay, let me see if I can support you, you know, even if that's just checking in every once in a while."