Actress Gwyneth Paltrow ‘shouts at the bushes’ to manage anxiety

Hollywood actress Gwyneth Paltrow has addressed her approach to managing anxiety and said shouting at the bushes and confessed that “it helps”. The actress was answering fan questions in an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on her Instagram Stories. Paltrow answered a fan who asked “How do you manage anxiety?”

She said, “I can’t really avoid anxiety, but I try to temper it with remembering things I am grateful for, breathing deeply, going for a walk, and shouting at the bushes (it helps) and being good to myself.”

She addressed her mental health again when she was asked how she avoids “overfunctioning and burnout,” reports people.com.

“I have avoided neither. I’m over functioned and burnt out, but I’m trying to get a little bit better this year at that and really prioritising sleep and boundaries around working and not working, but I have some work to do.” Paltrow said in a November 2025 episode of her the goop podcast that she believes she has “a bit of ADD and I can really sort of get pulled in lots of directions. I would love to try to not do that so much and feel more grounded throughout the day.”

Noting that she could get a bad work email and “really take it like it’s a slap in the face,” the Marty Supreme star said that she believes being in the spotlight has affected her nervous system.

“I’ve lived a very intense life in the public eye for a really, really long time. And so I think whenever we’re at the mercy of people’s opinions and all the energy behind the opinions — I’m very sensitive, as most of us are — so I feel that and it kind of frays my nervous system.”

“I think also my hormonal phase of life, I have a lot of anxiety for the very first time in my life, which is just a symptom of hormonal changes,” continued Paltrow. “I think it’s an estrogen dominance thing. It makes you really anxious ... So part of it is physiological, part of it is psychological, part of it’s emotional and part of it’s public life.”

She said she is working on her mental health with the help of the therapists, one of whom is a nervous system specialist. The actress also said she gets “healing from my family, from my kids and my husband.”

Paltrow gained notice for her early work in films such as Seven (1995), Emma (1996), Sliding Doors (1998), and A Perfect Murder (1998). She garnered wider acclaim for her performance as Viola de Lesseps in the historical romance Shakespeare in Love (1998) which won her several awards, including the Academy Award for Best Actress. This was followed by roles in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), Shallow Hal (2001), and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004).

After becoming a parent in 2004, Paltrow reduced her acting workload. She made intermittent appearances in films, such as in the drama Proof (2005), which earned her a nomination for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress. In 2009, she received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Spoken Word Album for Children for the children’s audiobook Brown Bear and Friends. In addition, she won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series for her guest role as Holly Holliday on the Fox musical television series Glee in 2011.

Agencies