Tune In: Actress Ashley Greene Opens Up About Panic Attacks, Motherhood & Mental Health

Actress Ashely Greene's first panic attack not so coincidentally lined up with her first magazine cover photo shoot.

"I grew up with a really strong work ethic—someone who you could count on. So I felt that even if I was stressed out, I had to push it down," she tells me, noting this was during the height of the Twilight frenzy, the biggest franchise and pop cultural touchstone of the time. "I was doing this when I was 20 years old, a time when you're really finding yourself. I was showing up for everyone else, so I was not really showing up for myself. All of a sudden, things started to crack." 

And once Twilight ended, her self-confidence was left in its wake. "My self-worth was tethered to this job I was doing, so when that ended, it hit me like a ton of bricks. And because I hadn't prioritized my mental health, I didn't have the tools to navigate it," she said.

This led to a slow, but meaningful, journey to learning how to care for herself. "Working on your mental health is a challenging, uncomfortable process, but it's obviously a thousand percent worth it. And when you're on the other side of it, you wonder why you weren't doing this in the first place," she says. 

Greene just launched a class series with mental wellness app Aura Health, where she shares her journey and talks about how she cares for herself now. I interviewed Greene on my podcast Clean Beauty School (so tune in to hear the conversation in its entirety). Throughout, we discuss what she's learned about being vulnerable, feeling beautiful in her journey with motherhood, and the sort of world she hopes her daughter grows up in. 

Being open—with yourself, with others, with a professional—is terrifying, but it's the only place to begin. 

"I wasn't happy with myself, even though I knew I was in this very privileged position of having a job that a lot of people would dream of. I struggled with why I was feeling so unhappy and developing unhealthy habits," she says. "Ideally I would have seen all these signs and symptoms—and had the education to be able to navigate these feelings, anxieties, and self-doubts—but for me, it was equally hard to recognize there was a problem and that I needed to do something about it." 

After coming to terms with herself that she needed to address these complex emotions, the first person she turned to was her husband.

For most folks, it's not one modality—it's an arsenal.

"It's important to not try and do everything at one time because that's impossible. You can't expect to go on this journey with a full tool kit—you have to start one tool at a time," she says. 

Her favorite (we all have one) is breathwork.

I'm not a mother, so I can't begin to comprehend all the complexities that go into motherhood. But I still found our conversation around motherhood to be most profound. You can tell that Greene takes her role as a parent seriously—and she thinks deeply about the world she wants her daughter to grow in. 

I suspect that has a lot to do with her practicing mindful parenting. 

Make no doubt about it: Mental health is work.

"I used to think it was just my industry that was brutal, but now because of social media and filters, it's everywhere," she says about the pressures to look, act, or feel a certain way. "It's really sickening." 

For Greene, teaching her daughter how to build self-worth comes down to being a role model herself.

"This comes down to me too—understanding my worth, what I bring to the table, what inner beauty is, and that social media is not real and you can't live up to it," she says. "It's not to say I don't have good days and bad days, but with bringing a baby girl into this world, it becomes a lot more important to have self-acceptance."

Ultimately, Greene notes, she knows she's her daughter's first and most enduring influence: "Your child looks at you and they absorb everything," she says. "And so I want my child to be able to look at me and say, 'Mommy loves herself and thinks she's beautiful. And Mommy looks at me and thinks I'm beautiful.'" 

I can't think of anything more worthwhile.