20 Celebrities Who've Had Panic Attacks
Panic attacks are sudden and powerful episodes of fear that trigger intense physical reactions. Not to be confused with anxiety attacks, which build gradually and are set off by specific stressors, panic attacks happen swifty and unexpectedly. Per WebMD, these episodes affect one in 10 adults in the US every year, and celebrities are no exception. In an effort to help others feel less alone, several celebrities have shared their personal panic attack stories and how these uncontrollable periods of anxiety influenced their mental health.
Panic attacks are not life-threatening, but they are alarming and can be severe enough to have harmful effects on a person’s quality of life. Symptoms typically include a rapid heart rate, trembling, shaking, chills, nausea, loss of control, shortness of breath and a sense of impending doom or danger. These symptoms may only last for a few minutes but can be so intense that the person experiencing them may be convinced they’re having a heart attack or even dying, according to Mayo Clinic. For those with recurring episodes, aka panic disorder, treatment may require therapy, medication and other types of medical treatment.
Experiencing a panic attack can be frightening, and speaking about one after the fact can also be challenging. Ahead, read what celebrities had to say about their personal experiences with panic attacks and how they were able to manage their symptoms.
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Kerry Washington
Kerry Washington first began experiencing panic attacks when she was seven years old after overhearing her parents’ late-night fights. “They manifested first as a rhythm of anxiety that encircled my brain, then evolved into a rapid pulsing, a whirling frenzy of metallic thumps, like those nauseating old spinning rides at a county fair,” she shared in her memoir, Thicker Than Water, per Oprah Daily in August 2023.
While her parents’ arguments varied in severity, Berry said the anticipation of yelling and door-slamming made her fearful, trembling in bed as she struggled to fall asleep. Despite her best efforts to calm herself by singing songs or reciting poems, Berry said she felt like her mind was conspiring against her. “I was dizzied with terror, no ground beneath me; it was crazy-making, endless. And sad,” she said. “There was something so sad about the rhythm. And I couldn’t make it stop. I couldn’t sleep. It was as though the alarms within me had been triggered and there was no turning them off.”
Gabrielle Union
As a survivor of sexual assault, Gabrielle Union has lived with panic attacks and PTSD for over 30 years. “Living with anxiety and panic attacks all these years has never been easy,” Union captioned an Instagram post sharing how PTSD and anxiety have impacted her life. “There are times the anxiety is so bad it shrinks my life. Leaving the house or making a left hand turn at an uncontrolled light can fill me with terror. Anxiety can turn my anticipation about a party or fun event I’ve been excited about attending (Met Ball) into pure agony.”
She continued, “When we tell y’all what we are experiencing, please believe us the 1st time we mention it. No, it’s not like being nervous and everyone experiences and deals with anxiety differently, and that’s OK. I don’t need you to try to ‘fix’ me. I share this as I hope everyone living with anxiety knows they aren’t alone or ‘being extra.’ I see you, I FEEL you and there is so much love for you. Always. Love and light good people. Be good to each other out there.”
Lady Gaga
Lady Gaga shared her personal experience with panic attacks during her acceptance speech at the SAG-AFTRA Foundation’s third annual Patron of the Artists Awards in 2018. “I began to notice that I would stare off into space and black out for seconds or minutes,” Gaga told the audience of her “mental health crisis,” per Variety. “I would see flashes of things I was tormented by, experiences that were filed away in my brain with ‘I’ll deal with you later’ for many years because my brain was protecting me, as science teaches us. These were also symptoms of dissociation and PTSD and I did not have a team that included mental health support.”
Gaga went on to explain that these struggles “later morphed into physical chronic pain, fibromyalgia, panic attacks, acute trauma responses, and debilitating mental spirals that have included suicidal ideation and masochistic behavior.” Since 2011, Gaga has been using her platform as a celebrity, and as the co-founder of the Born This Way Foundation, to destigmatize conversations around mental health and make healthcare accessible to people globally.
Elizabeth Olsen
Years before breaking onto the Hollywood scene, Elizabeth Olsen experienced her first panic attack while walking through New York City. “I didn’t understand what anxiety or a panic attack was until I was 21,” she told Variety in October 2022. “[That’s when I] started getting panic attacks. I remember I would get them on the hour every hour. I used to live on 13th Street between 6th and 7th. I was crossing 6th Avenue at 14th Street, and I realized I couldn’t cross the street — I stood up against the wall, and I just thought I was going to drop dead at any moment.”
She continued, “If I went from cold to hot, hot to cold, full to hungry, hungry to full — any kind of shift in my body, my whole body thought, ‘Uh oh, something’s wrong!’ And I just started spiraling. It was so weird. A ENT doctor said that it could be vertigo related because it was all about truly spinning. So it was an interesting six months.”
With the help of a friend, Olsen said she eventually learned a few “brain games” that helped her control her thoughts during these spiraling moments. “When I would walk down the street, I would just start naming everything I saw out loud to get myself out of the spiraling thoughts in my brain,” she said. “That was a helpful tool. But it just became a practice that got me out of it. I didn’t want to be on medication, but I had medication in case I felt like I was having an emergency and just having that in my bag felt good.”
Missy Elliott
In 2015, Missy Elliott experienced a panic attack that sent her to the emergency room just hours before she was scheduled to perform with Katy Perry at the Super Bowl halftime show. “I didn’t know how many people watch the Super Bowl, so when I did it, I ended up in the emergency room,” she recalled in a 2023 interview with Gayle King on Good Morning America. “My anxiety kicked in. [My performance] was a secret, and then the day before, people started whispers, like, ‘I think Missy’s coming out on Katy Perry’s set,’ and I started freaking out. So, the wee hours of the morning before the Super Bowl, before I performed, I was at the emergency room.”
Reflecting on the moment years later, Elliott expressed her gratitude for the freedom to have an open conversation about her mental health in a public space.”It feels good to be in a time now where you can talk about it,” she said. “Because you realize there’s a lot of people that suffer from anxiety.”
Selena Gomez
For Selena Gomez, touring has long been a major source of anxiety, often leading to panic attacks. “Tours are a really lonely place for me,” she told Vogue in 2017. “My self-esteem was shot. I was depressed, anxious. I started to have panic attacks right before getting onstage, or right after leaving the stage. Basically I felt I wasn’t good enough, wasn’t capable. I felt I wasn’t giving my fans anything, and they could see it — which, I think, was a complete distortion.”
In the years since this interview, Gomez has been vocal about her mental health struggles. In 2022, she joined First Lady Jill Biden for a conversation about mental health at the White House’s inaugural Mental Health Youth Forum. The same year, Gomez released her documentary, My Mind and Me, which provides an intimate glimpse at her rise to fame and the mental and emotional effects of being a child star. In October 2023, she also hosted the first annual Rare Impact Fund Benefit to raise money for various mental health organizations.
Dakota Johnson
A sudden bout of stage fright sent Dakota Johnson into a panic attack when she was asked to sing on set for the 2019 film Our Friend. “That was so scary,” Johnson said in an interview on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. She continued, “Singing in front of people is actually so terrifying for me.”
Johnson said she was so overwhelmed, she took off running from the set, leaving the cast and crew confused by her actions. “I had a panic attack that manifested in all the ways that it does, that it can, so, like, I just took off running,” she said. “Running, like around the theater, around backstage. I was running around, and then just started laughing hysterically, and everyone on the crew’s like, ‘What’s she doing?’ Running around, laughing and then [I] just stopped moving and started crying . . . It was like extreme flight mode.”
Viola Davis
Viola Davis’s first red carpet experience was more terrifying than she anticipated. “I remember my first red carpet, I had a panic attack,” Davis said in a 2019 interview with Willie Geist on Sunday Today. Recalling the episode, Davis said she began “shaking uncontrollably” and “hyperventilating.” “It’s one of two panic attacks I’ve ever had in my entire life. I wouldn’t even wish that upon my worst enemy. I don’t have a lot of enemies, but I would not wish that upon anybody.”
Prince Harry
Following his mother, Princess Diana’s death, Prince Harry said he experienced persistent panic attacks for years before he realized he could seek treatment. “In my case, every single time I was in any room with loads of people, which is quite often, I was just pouring with sweat, my heart beating — boom, boom, boom, boom — literally, just like a washing machine,” he said in an interview with Forces TV, a UK Army channel. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, get me out of here now. Oh, hang on, I can’t get out of here, I have got to just hide it.”
Harry went on to add that going on tour in Afghanistan during his time in the UK military allowed him to meet other people experiencing similar symptoms of anxiety. After building a rapport about mental health with his fellow soldiers, Prince Harry said they all felt less alone. Building these connections later inspired him to seek treatment. “You help yourself so that you can help others,” he said.
Emma Stone
Emma Stone first began seeing a therapist for her anxiety and panic attacks when she was 8 years old. “The first time I had a panic attack, I was sitting in my friend’s house, and I thought the house was burning down,” Stone told The Wall Street Journal in a 2015 interview. “I called my mom and she brought me home, and for the next three years, it just would not stop.”
Recalling the same episode in an interview with NPR in 2024, Stone added that the pivotal moment led to the start of her lifelong relationship with therapy. “I started in therapy, I think around age 8, because it was getting really hard for me to leave the house to go to school,” she said. “I sort of lived in fear of these panic attacks.” Therapy helped Stone develop healthy coping mechanisms for these episodes of physical and mental overwhelm. Later in life, she also found solace in acting and improv, activities which allowed her to remain present in the moment without worrying about the future or the past.
Chris Evans
For Chris Evans, increased levels of personal anxiety correlated directly with increased fame as his career began to take off. The first time he began experiencing panic attacks on set was when he was filming the 2011 film Puncture. “[The panic attacks] were enough to throw me a bit and enough to make me question if I was on the right path,” Evans said on The Hollywood Reporter‘s Awards Chatter podcast in 2020. He continued, “I really started to think, ‘I’m not sure if this [acting] is the right thing for me, I’m not sure if I’m feeling as healthy as I should be feeling.’”
Concerned about his health, Evans initially turned down Marvel’s first offer to cast him as Captain America in a nine-film deal. “I went to a few different therapists. My suffering would be my own. That was too much to cope with at the time,” he said of his decision. After turning down more roles and taking time to prioritize his mental health, Evans eventually returned to a place where he felt more confident appearing in front of the camera without sacrificing his well-being.
Jennifer Lopez
Jennifer Lopez recalled having a panic attack during a photo shoot when she realized her seven-year marriage to Marc Anthony would ultimately end in divorce. “As I sat there getting made up, my heart was beating out of my chest and I felt like I couldn’t breathe . . . I became consumed with anxiety,” Lopez wrote in her 2014 memoir, True Love, according to E! News.
She continued, “Anybody looking from the outside in would have thought my life was great. I had a husband and two beautiful children. I was on American Idol and my new single ‘On the Floor’ had gone to number one all over the world. What people didn’t know was that life really wasn’t that good. My relationship was falling apart and I was terrified.” Though Lopez felt like she was “going crazy” at the time, she has since moved past her initial feelings of panic and rekindled her relationship with Ben Affleck, who she married in Las Vegas in July 2022.
Stephen Colbert
Stephen Colbert realized performing was a remedy for his anxiety after panic attacks began to have a severe impact on his everyday life. “I had a bit of a nervous breakdown after I got married — kind of panic attacks,” Colbert told Rolling Stone 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.”
While he took medication for his anxiety at the time, Colbert said he would still “curl up in a ball on the couch backstage and I would wait to hear my cue lines. Then I would uncurl and go onstage and I’d feel fine.” As soon as he was offstage, Colbert would be wracked with anxiety again, which ultimately led to a life-changing epiphany: performing was the key to overcoming his panic attacks. “Creating something is what helped me from just spinning apart like an unweighted flywheel,” he continued. “And I haven’t stopped since. Even when I was a writer I always had to be in front of a camera a little bit. I have to perform. I’m so grateful. Comedy was my savior as a child. And still [is].”
Gina Rodriguez
Gina Rodriguez revealed that her first panic attack took place at a public restaurant two years after making her debut as the title character in Jane the Virgin. “I had my first panic attack at a sushi restaurant,” Rodriguez recalled in Cosmopolitan’s February 2019 cover story. “All of a sudden, I thought I was going to die, and people [were] taking pictures. It was horrendous.”
Lili Reinhart
Lili Reinhart said she experienced “the worst panic attack of my life” when she moved to Los Angeles to pursue a full-time acting career. At 18 years old, Reinhart felt overwhelmed being on her own and the anxieties began to pile up. “My anxiety was so bad that I had to keep quitting jobs because I physically could not work,” she said in a 2017 interview with W Magazine.
One day, while on a mission to find an outfit suitable for auditions, Reinhart’s panic attacks led to an unforgettable Uber ride. “I threw up in my Uber because, one, I was carsick, and two, I was having a panic attack,” she said. “I get home, lock the door in my room, immediately Skype my mom and said, ‘Mom, I’m not okay.’ I had to get a brown paper bag and breathe into it, which felt so dramatic, but I really could not breathe. I felt like my world was crashing. I didn’t want to admit defeat, but I was like, ‘I need to come home. My mental health is suffering, and it is making me physically ill.’” Once she returned home, Reinhart began seeing her former therapist again. “She really helped me build myself back up again,” Reinhart added.
Robert Pattinson
While filming a Dior ad in 2023, Robert Pattinson faced one of his biggest fears: dancing. The experience initially gave Pattinson a newfound confidence in his dancing abilities, but ultimately resulted in a severe panic attack. “I thought I’d broken my curse when I did that scene,” Pattinson told Variety of filming the ad. “But then I went to a party a few weeks later — thinking I’m like Billy Elliot — and as soon as I took one step on to the dance floor had one of the biggest panic attacks of my life. You know when you think you’re that guy and then suddenly, you’re just brutally humbled. Yeah, it felt like my dad had just caught me joy riding a car. I went cold; I think I left the party after that.”
Amanda Seyfried
Amanda Seyfried acknowledged the physical and mental toll of being a Hollywood actor in a candid interview with Willie Geist on Sunday Today in 2021. “It feels like life or death. That’s what a panic attack is, really,” Seyfried said of the anxiety she experiences as a result of being in the spotlight. “Your body just goes into fight or flight. The endorphin rush and the dump that happens after the panic attack is so extraordinary. You just feel so relieved and your body is just kind of recovered in a way. It’s so bizarre because it’s physiological, but it starts in your head.”
Finn Wolfhard
Finn Wolfhard said he began having recurring panic attacks when he was 15 or 16 years old. At the time, the actor kept his anxieties quiet in an effort to prioritize work. “I just was having this crazy whirlwind career, so there was no time [to talk about how I was feeling], or at least we didn’t feel [there was] at the time,” he told GQ in 2023. “Everyone was like, ‘Look at him, he’s fine. He’s having the best time.’” Though he actively maintained the charade that everything was all right, Wolfhard found himself struggling to control his emotions as a young actor.
In the same GQ interview, Wolfhard recounted having a panic attack while filming Jesse Eisenberg’s 2022 film When You Finish Saving the World. “I was so uptight and nervous about it, because I just was like, ‘This is the first movie [that I’m doing] as an adult.’” Later in the interview, Wolfhard also recalled a particularly stressful panic attack on the set of Stranger Things while filming with his co-stars Gaten Matarazzo and Caleb McLaughlin. During the episode, the Duffer brothers stopped filming and Matarazzo and McLaughlin went to comfort Wolfhard with hugs.
Melissa Villaseñor
Melissa Villaseñor took her panic attacks as a sign that it was time to take a break from work and prioritize her mental health. In a 2022 interview on The Last Laugh podcast, she detailed her experience behind the scenes of Saturday Night Live and how the demands of being on such a high-profile show impacted her everyday life. “Last season, I had a couple panic attacks,” Villaseñor said of her decision to leave the long-running sketch-comedy series, where she served as a cast member for six seasons. “I was struggling, and I always felt like I was on the edge of a cliff every week. I was like, ‘I don’t want to do that to myself anymore.’”
Hugh Grant
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly in 2016, Hugh Grant revealed that being his own biggest critic has led to waves of “out-of-the-blue panic attacks” for years. “It’ll be in a very easy, simple scene when everything is going swimmingly, and then suddenly, bang, I’m shvitzing and can’t remember my lines,” he explained.
According to Grant, the episodes began when he was filming Notting Hill. Though he’s taken medication and tried several methods to relieve his anxiety, the various treatments have had little effect on his periodic panic attacks. “At one stage I was asking directors not to say ‘action’ because I found that the word sent me into paroxysms of terror,” Grant said.
