Shailene Woodley on the guilt of being OK during coronavirus quarantine: 'It's enough to actually drive us crazy'
Big Little Lies actress Shailene Woodley is feeling OK during the coronavirus pandemic and that is making her feel bad.
“I'm actually doing really good, but it's hard to say that when you know so many people aren't,” Woodley says during Yahoo’s Reset Your Mindset event. When talking about her feelings with a friend, he gave her some advice, relaying that it’s important to “recognize what’s going on, to not be ignorant about what’s going on, to be in service the best that you can and to celebrate where you’re at in your life as well,” adding that “guilt is not going to help anything and it’s not going to progress this world.”
“I'm actually doing really good, but it's hard to say that when you know so many people aren't.” Shailene Woodley
She found her friend’s words to be “completely correct” and theorized people self-inflict guilt as a way to “rationalize the injustice that happens on the planet” and “why certain things happen to certain people at certain times.”
So part of the way Woodley has been coping during the coronavirus pandemic has been readdressing her relationship with guilt.
“It’s enough to actually drive us crazy and to create a certain like death within our own minds,” she says.
Woodley added that she’s come to realize that the emotion isn’t serving her — or her sick neighbor.
The Divergent star appeared alongside her mother, Lori Woodley, her co-founder in the non-profit All It Takes that equips youth with emotional intelligence skills. For the 28-year-old, a factor that plays into her personal mental wellness maintenance is spending less time on social media, which Shailene says “can be such a monster.”
“My advice always is just don’t read comments. Like, don't,” she continued. “I really wish that they would just remove comments and likes or make them only visible, you know, like maybe there's a filter they have to go through. It's just there. It's, it's just an unnecessary cloud for your mind to have to like siphon through it. It doesn't make any sense to me.”
At the very least, Shailene advised people to clean out their feeds, deleting anything that isn’t serving them.
For Shailene, another way of taking care of herself is to regularly get rid of her phone.
“I have over 200 unread text messages on the phone right now,” she said. “I have not listened to a voicemail in maybe four-and-a-half years. I have thousands of unread emails, and it is my way of self-preservation, and I've just come to the place in my life where I understand that it's frustrating for a lot of people, but if they truly care about me and love me, they're just going to accept that that is part of me and that is how I self preserve.”
Another quick fix is a luxurious bath.
“Oh, candles, Epsom salts, books, music, all the oils,” Shailene said. “I don’t just sit in hot water. I make it a spa life. Why? Why can’t we have spa life at home? Why does it have to be sorted to a $200 situation in somewhere, you know, fancy. You can, you can set a vibe at home.”
Read more from Yahoo Life
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