Cara Delevingne has learned the importance of staying on top of her mental and physical health.
The model and actress sat on a panel at the Youth Mental Health benefit on June 12 and said she’s struggled with anxiety since she was young, calling it a “downfall” that she’s no longer trying to hide.
“It’s something you can’t hide. You can only be cured by talking about it,” the 30-year-old said. “I’m done with running away from me because all I’m doing is running away from myself and running into a wall.”
“Anxiety — the thing about it is the ‘what ifs’ and the not knowing,” she explained. “So not knowing, it’s a powerful thing to be able to admit that you don’t know. I don’t know what’s gonna happen tomorrow. I don’t know what’s gonna happen in five minutes. But I’m ok with that because I’m in this present moment and the ‘what ifs’ – what if this goes really badly? What if I don’t sound that smart? What if I look stupid with this outfit on — who knows? But it’s those questions which can plague you and you can just live in that spiral and kind of get worse and worse.”
Delevingne said that for her anxiety, therapy was never beneficial because she often found it made her “talk herself into being more anxious.” Instead, she turned to yoga to cope whenever she was “in her head so much.”
“Yoga was really the first thing that really helped me, not the exercise version, the breath work behind it all,” she explained. “Learning to connect back into your body. Also, just being healthy in general with things like exercise.”
Delevingne added that although there’s a lot of awareness recently about anxiety and depression, people often don’t have the tools to “process the emotions behind it.”
“Sometimes the more energy you give to the anxiety, sometimes the worse it gets, you don’t know how to kind of move through it,” the supermodel said, noting that she’s tried many different forms of therapy.
Despite the trial and error of finding a solution for her mental health issues, she said she benefited from entering a 12-step program last fall after struggling with substance abuse. Delevingne said the experience drove her to “not make any more excuses” and commit to healing and being open about her health journey.
“I’ve found for me the one thing about getting sober is 12-step programs are really helpful more to me because of the community aspect,” she continued. “Through this I found an incredible source of community and inspiration from groups of women who lift each other up everyday.”
“Treatment isn’t for everyone, nothing is for everyone, but the things that have really helped me is learning to love myself through other people, learning to really be myself with other people,” Delevingne shared. “Because I think my whole thing was always trying to be perfect even though I definitely wasn’t perfect. But in my head, I just wanted to be better than what I was. It was like who I was, who I really was, who I was trying to be and who I thought I was if that makes sense. There was always a huge discrepancy and so now I feel like I’ve closed those gaps and all of those things.”