17 Famous People Living With Anxiety Disorders

Multiple Grammy winner Adele got candid about her mental health after announcing her divorce from her husband, Simon Konecki, in 2019. It led to a few weeks of intense bed-bound anxiety, she said in an interview with Rolling Stone from 2021.

“Then having so many people that I don’t know know that I didn’t make that work … it f*cking devastated me,” Adele told Rolling Stone. “I was embarrassed. No one made me feel embarrassed, but you feel like you didn’t do a good job.”

The “Easy on Me” singer said she spent the rest of 2019 trying new things to help her cope with her anxiety, such as hiking, going to the gym, traveling, and sound baths. “Anything that could soothe my anxiety, I threw myself in headfirst,” she told Rolling Stone.

She also gave up drinking for about six months because she was tired of having “hangxiety,” a colloquial term for hangovers accompanied by anxiety.

In her 2022 song “Anxiety,” Megan Thee Stallion opened up about being a “bad b*tch” with “bad anxiety”: “All I really wanna hear is ‘It’ll be okay.’ Bounce back ’cause a bad b*tch can have bad days.”

She alluded to her mental health again in her 2023 song, “Cobra”: “Never thought a b*tch like me would ever hit rock bottom. Man, I miss my parents, way too anxious, always cancel my plans.”

Losing both parents — her father when she was in ninth grade and her mother in 2019 — helped the Grammy Award–winning artist realize she needed to seek mental health support.

“I’ve lost both of my parents. So now I’m like, ‘Oh, my gosh, who do I talk to? What do I do?’ And I just started learning that it’s okay to ask for help. And it’s okay to want to go get therapy,” the “Her” rapper said during the season premiere of actor Taraji P. Henson’s Facebook Watch series, Peace of Mind With Taraji.

It also led her to launch a mental health resources website, Bad B*tches Have Bad Days Too, in August 2022. The website offers links to therapy platforms, hotlines, and resources for people in specific communities, including LGBTQ+ communities and Black communities.

In a four-part interview with Vogue published in 2021, Kendall Jenner spoke openly about what it’s like to live with anxiety. “I remember being really young and having shortness of breath and going to my mom and telling her,” said Jenner. “In hindsight, now I know that that was obviously anxiety.”

She got candid about her anxiety again in another Vogue interview published in 2024: “In my career right now I feel really stable, really hopeful,” Jenner told Vogue. “But I’ve had a tough two months. I haven’t been myself, and my friends see it. I’m more sad than usual. I’m way more anxious than usual.

“So I’m not going to sit here and act like everything’s perfect,” she said. “That’s life — I’m always going to be in and out of those feelings. In past interviews, when someone’s asked me about my mental state, it’s always been, ‘I’m great right now, but this is what I’ve dealt with.’ Well, right now I’m actually in it.”

When Jenner finds herself struggling with anxiety — including social anxiety (a fear of being watched and judged by others) — she turns to strategies proven to help her face the day with “a calmer, more positive mindset,” she explained in an April 2022 Instagram post. Some of those go-to strategies, Jenner wrote, are deep breathing, journaling, practicing gratitude, and being outside in the sun.

She also turns to horseback riding to help her feel better. “Whenever I go ride, of course it’s a great excuse to get outside and not be on my phone and forget about work and fully put my brain and my energy into how I’m going to get my horse over these obstacles,” Jenner told Vogue.

Shortly after the death of his mother, Princess Diana of Wales, in 1997, Prince Harry experienced severe anxiety and panic attacks. “Before I even left the house [for royal engagements], I was pouring with sweat and my heart was racing. I was in the fight-or-flight mode,” Harry disclosed in the docuseries The Me You Can’t See on Apple TV+.

That led the young royal to turn to substances to cope with his overwhelming emotions. “I was willing to drink, I was willing to take drugs, I was willing to try and do the things that made me feel less like I was feeling,” he explained. “I would probably drink a week’s worth in one day on a Friday or a Saturday night.”

Spending 10 years in the British Army brought the prince solace because it allowed him to escape constant media coverage of his life, he said in an interview with Vanity Fair published in April 2022.

After marrying at age 33, Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, stepped back from representing the Queen at official engagements in January 2020, later moving to California. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey that aired in March 2021, the couple explained those decisions stemmed from the negative mental health impact of serving as working royals as well as hurtful media coverage of their family.

When pop star Selena Gomez took a career break in 2016, it was because of panic attacks, depression, and anxiety connected to having been diagnosed with lupus, according to People. Then, in October 2018, People reported that she had sought treatment for her mental health after suffering a panic attack while in the hospital for a low white blood cell count — a complication often associated with kidney transplants and people with lupus. (Gomez had received a kidney transplant in the summer of 2017 from her best friend, Francia Raisa.)

Earlier in 2018, she spoke to Harper’s Bazaar about why she was taking her time creating new music. “I’ve had a lot of issues with depression and anxiety, and I’ve been very vocal about it, but it’s not something I feel I’ll ever overcome,” she said. “I want to make sure I’m healthy. If that’s good, everything else will fall into place.”

More recently, in a 2022 Apple TV+ documentary titled Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me, she went into detail about her years of treatment for both physical and mental health issues. “I’m a little nervous but excited to share this with you all,” Gomez wrote on Instagram just days before the release of the trailer for the film.

In addition, the Only Murders in the Building star has been seeking to normalize conversations about mental health through her platform, WonderMind, which she cofounded in 2021.

Late-night comedian Stephen Colbert’s journey with anxiety began after marrying his wife, Evelyn, in 1993.

“I had a bit of a nervous breakdown after I got married — kind of panic attacks,” Colbert told Rolling Stone in an interview published in 2018. “My wife would go off to work and she’d come home — because I worked at night — and I’d be walking around the couch. And she’s like, ‘How was your day?’ And I’d say, ‘You’re looking at it.’ Just tight circles around the couch.”

He took alprazolam (Xanax), an anxiety medication, to ease his symptoms, but decided to stop taking it after nine days. In his case, he didn’t feel like it was helping him deal with the things that were making him anxious head-on. “I’d sometimes hold the bottle, to go like, ‘I could stop this feeling if I wanted, but I’m not going to. Because I know if I stop the feeling, somehow I’m not working through it, like I have got to go through the tunnel with the spiders in it,” he told Rolling Stone.

He found that performing on stage was what helped the most. “I would go to the show, and I would curl up in a ball on the couch backstage, and I would wait to hear my cue lines,” Colbert told Rolling Stone. “Then I would uncurl and go onstage, and I’d feel fine. Which occurred to me at the time: Like, ‘Oh, you feel fine when you’re out here.’ And then as soon as I got offstage, I’d just crumble into a ball again.”

“Creating something is what helped me from just spinning apart like an unweighted flywheel. And I haven’t stopped since,” he told Rolling Stone.

Cleveland Cavaliers small forward Marcus Morris grew up in a North Philadelphia neighborhood filled with gang violence, an environment that contributed to his anxiety and depression, he says.

“I’ve seen guys get shot just for sitting on the wrong front step,” Morris said in a 2018 interview with ESPN. “You wake up every day thinking, ‘How am I going to protect myself?’”

Throughout high school, Morris and his identical twin brother, Markieff, excelled at basketball. But after joining the NBA in 2011 and then jumping from team to team, he began feeling increasingly anxious about his play. Soon he found himself trying to self-medicate anxiety away with sleeping pills and marijuana — but to no avail.

After seeing a mental health therapist, Morris began to feel calmer, happier, and more productive. He also relies on daily meditation to help him feel centered, focused on the present moment, and in control of his emotions — even in stressful situations.

The “Shallow” singer was frank about her mental health issues in a 2015 interview with Billboard. “I’ve suffered through depression and anxiety my entire life; I still suffer with it every single day,” Gaga said.

“I openly admit to having battled [both], and I think a lot of people do,” Gaga told the British newspaper The Mirror in 2016. “I think it’s better when we all say, ‘Cheers!’ and fess up to it.”

In 2012, the Grammy Award–winning artist, born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, created the Born This Way Foundation to build empowered communities and improve mental health resources for young adults. The foundation’s mission is “to build a kinder and braver world,” said Gaga in a video on the foundation’s website.

Following a bombing during her Manchester Arena concert in May 2017, Ariana Grande experienced symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to a British Vogue cover story in which she also revealed, “I’ve always had anxiety.”

But that anxiety — along with depression — reached “an all-time high” in 2019, when a bout of panic attacks led her to cancel a meet-and-greet before a performance in Belgium. “I have been giving you all I’ve got and trying to push through as hard as I can and mask it,” she said in a statement.

In 2021, the “We Can’t Be Friends” singer announced a collaboration with BetterHelp, a virtual therapy platform, to give away $1 million worth of therapy. “I so hope that this will be a helpful starting point and that you’ll be able to build space for this in your lives and continue!” Grande wrote in a post on Instagram. “Healing is not linear or easy, but you are worth the effort and time, I promise!”

In 2017, the Jane the Virgin star took a silent, makeup-free video of herself for her photographer friend Anton Soggiu’s “Ten Second Portraits” project on Instagram, which has been reposted on ETonline.

“I suffer from anxiety. And watching this clip, I could see how anxious I was. But I empathize with myself,” Rodriguez wrote on Instagram. “I wanted to protect her and tell her it’s okay to be anxious, there is nothing different or strange about having anxiety and I will prevail. I like watching this video. It makes me uncomfortable, but there is a freedom I feel, maybe even an acceptance. This is me. Puro Gina.”

In a 2016 episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, fashion mogul and reality TV icon Kim Kardashian opened up about her anxiety, particularly around car crashes, and said she had started seeing a therapist.

Her younger sister Kendall Jenner also struggles with anxiety and sleep paralysis, and in the same episode they attend a meditation class together, as reported by Us Weekly, as a way of easing their symptoms.

Just a month prior to that episode, Kardashian had been bound and held at gunpoint in a Paris hotel room. “I definitely get a lot more anxiety today, simply with people knowing your every move,” Kardashian told TSingapore.com in a September 2017 interview.

Kardashian felt the robbery in Paris, as well as quarantining during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, led her to develop agoraphobia — an anxiety disorder involving extreme fear of entering open or crowded places, leaving one’s home, or being in a place that’s difficult to escape.

During an interview at the Child Mind Institute in October 2018, the actress divulged that she had her first panic attack at 7 years old.

“I was at a friend’s house, and all of a sudden I was absolutely convinced the house was on fire and it was burning down,” Stone recalled. “I was just sitting in her bedroom and obviously the house wasn’t on fire, but there was nothing in me that didn’t think we were going to die.”

Soon after that first panic attack, Stone started seeing a therapist who diagnosed her with GAD. She says she still has panic attacks to this day, but seeing a therapist, meditating, and reaching out to people instead of staying isolated helps her cope.

“You don’t have to be an actor to get over anxiety, you don’t have to be a writer to overcome it. You just have to find what that thing is within you that you are drawn to,” Stone said.

The comedian and cohost of The View is so fearful of flying that for decades she traveled by private bus from New York to Los Angeles rather than step foot on a plane, according to BET.

Goldberg’s condition (aerophobia) began as a child, then intensified after she saw two planes collide midair while standing on a balcony in San Diego more than 30 years ago, she explained in a 2011 CNN interview.

Aerophobia is a form of anxiety known as a specific phobia, an uncontrollable, irrational fear of a particular object or situation. Treatment for phobias usually includes cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and exposure therapy, a specific type of CBT that helps people learn to face their fears. Medication may be an option in some cases, but it’s not usually recommended to treat phobias because talk therapy is usually effective enough, according to the U.K.’s National Health Service.

To overcome her fear, Goldberg went for the second option: She took a Virgin Atlantic course designed to help people work through their issues with flying, CNN reported. And in May 2022 she announced she’d flown for the first time in years to Scotland and back, according to Good Housekeeping.

“Some people are meant to fly. And I don’t know if I was meant to fly, but I do it now,” she said.

During the 2012 U.S. Open, tennis player Mardy Fish withdrew from the tournament for “health reasons,” according to USA Today. Later it was revealed that he’d been living with a severe anxiety disorder that included panic attacks, sleepless nights, and days spent in isolation.

Fortunately, after Fish’s psychiatrist prescribed him medication, he began to feel relief. Fish has since retired from tennis and says that anxiety is no longer an enemy.

“I was in bad shape, and I got out of it and thrived,” Fish explained to Golf Digest in 2022. “It’s not something that will go away for good, but I have really good days almost every day.”

“I’ve battled a lot of things, including anxiety and depression,” the Grammy nominee revealed to Billboard in 2016. “Finding the strength to come forward about those things is not easy. But maybe, by telling my story, I can help someone else going through tough times.”

The following year, in November, Kesha penned an article for Time describing how hard holidays can be when you have a mental health condition like anxiety. “The holiday season is supposed to be the most festive and fun time of the year, but sometimes it can quickly become a stressful and emotional time,” she wrote. “This is especially true for those of us who struggle with mental illness — be it depression, anxiety, addiction or any other challenges.”

Her anxiety has not gone away, but Kesha said in an interview on Refinery 29 that she has learned ways to cope with it: “I go through waves of intense anxiety, and then there are moments where I just take a bubble bath and do a face mask and try to relax and accept. None of us really know how to cope with this, so it’s helped me to realize that we’re all experiencing a roller coaster of emotions — and that’s okay.”

In 2023, she opened up about mistaking intense anxiety for a “psychotic break” and turning to “spirituality” to help her heal. “I went through this crazy psychedelic spiritual experience in the midst of the anxiety … it was pure anxiety,” Kesha said in an interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “My brain felt like … I thought maybe it was the process of having a psychotic break or something. But then once I just started leaning into it, I was like, ‘Well, it’s happening, so what am I going to do about it?’”

“Yeah. I’m on Lexapro, and I’ll never get off of it,” the actress told Allure magazine in 2016, referring to the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) commonly prescribed to treat GAD and depression.

“I’ve been on it since I was 19, so 11 years. I’m on the lowest dose. I don’t see the point of getting off of it,” said Seyfried, who Time named one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2022. “Whether it’s placebo or not, I don’t want to risk it. And what are you fighting against? Just the stigma of using a tool? A mental illness is a thing that people cast in a different category [from other illnesses], but I don’t think it is. It should be taken as seriously as anything else.”

The Mamma Mia! and Les Miserables star has also been open about having obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which shares characteristics with anxiety disorders.

“You don’t see the mental illness: It’s not a mass; it’s not a cyst. But it’s there,” she continued in the interview with Allure. “Why do you need to prove it? If you can treat it, you treat it. I had pretty bad health anxiety that came from the OCD and thought I had a tumor in my brain. I had an MRI, and the neurologist referred me to a psychiatrist. As I get older, the compulsive thoughts and fears have diminished a lot. Knowing that a lot of my fears are not reality-based really helps.”

The Girls executive producer, director, and writer has had her fair share of firsthand experiences with GAD and OCD. In fact, she has written about it extensively in her show as well as in her memoir Not That Kind of Girl and in a detailed account of her childhood therapy sessions for The New Yorker.

“I don’t remember a time not being anxious,” she declared to a panel at NewYork-Presbyterian’s Youth Anxiety Center in February 2017, according to Vogue.

“I would tell my younger self to squeeze my dog tightly and to read a book and to meditate and breathe,” Dunham told People, also in 2017. “And to understand that I’m not alone; that there are so many other kids like me who are suffering this way, and the greatest thing I can do for them and myself is to be honest.”

In 2020, People reported that Dunham had told her three million followers that she’d found relief from her anxiety symptoms through exercise. “To those struggling with anxiety, OCD, depression: I know it’s mad annoying when people tell you to exercise, and it took me about 16 medicated years to listen,” she wrote. “I’m glad I did. It ain’t about the a**, it’s about the brain.”

The Takeaway

Anxiety disorders affect nearly 1 in 5 U.S. adults, and that includes the Hollywood circle. Household names like Adele, Prince Harry, Megan Thee Stallion, Stephen Colbert, Selena Gomez, and more have opened up about what it’s like to live with anxiety and how they cope with it.

Additional reporting by Christina Vogt.