The former supermodel is opening up about her lifetime struggles with anxiety.
Speaking with TODAY, Paulina Perizkova broke down just how bad things had gotten for her in discussion about her new memoir, “No Filter: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful.”
Porizkova detailed one such time when “My heart kept punching my ribs so hard it was as though it were trying to escape,” she said. She sat in her bathroom and “waited to die.”
She was 10-years-old at the time of this panic attack.
The new memoir documents Porizkova’s childhood in Czechoslovakia and her adulthood in the supermodel and fashion sphere.
In her early 20s she was diagnosed with a panic disorder after suffering the attacks for most of her life. It was in her 40s they became too much to handle.
"There were times in my life where it would actively prevent me from living, from experiencing things, because I was so bogged down with anxiety that I didn’t leave the house or I didn’t dare to get on public transportation,” she said.
“This is an anxiety that sits on your shoulder at all times and it weighs you down.”
She explained she still struggles to this day but is managing.
“It doesn’t happen every day, but when it happens I embrace it and I immerse myself fully in it,” she said. “So, I feel like I actually lead a very joyful, a very anxious life.”
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“No Filter: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful” is available now.
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