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Zendaya opens up about going to therapy: ‘I think it’s a beautiful thing’

Actor says: ‘There’s nothing wrong with working on yourself’

Chelsea Ritschel
New York
Tuesday 07 September 2021 16:31 BST
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Zendaya opens up about going to therapy
Zendaya opens up about going to therapy (AFP via Getty Images)

Zendaya has spoken candidly about prioritising her mental health, with the actor revealing that she attends, and recommends, therapy.

The 25-year-old Spiderman star discussed her belief in the importance of working on oneself during a new interview with British Vogue for the magazine’s October issue.

When asked whether she has a therapist, Zendaya said: “Yeah, of course I go to therapy. I mean, if anybody is able to possess the financial means to go to therapy, I would recommend they do that. I think it’s a beautiful thing.

“You know, there’s nothing wrong with working on yourself and dealing with those things with someone who can help you, someone who can talk to you, who’s not your mom or whatever. Who has no bias.”

The actor then addressed the pandemic, and how it impacted her happiness and mental health, explaining that it left her sad and feeling as if she had a “dark cloud” hovering over her.

According to Zendaya, during the last year and a half, she experienced her “first kind of taste of sadness where you wake up and you just feel bad all day, like what the f*** is going on? What is this dark cloud that’s hovering over me and I don’t know how to get rid of it, you know?”

Elsewhere in the interview, the Euphoria star touched on some of the other topics that she and her therapist cover, such as money, with Zendaya revealing that she finds herself “somewhere in-between” her mother’s preference to save and her father’s reminder that “you can’t spend it when you’re dead”.

For the actor, this meant having her assistant plan and pay for all of the expenses for a trip to Greece on her credit card but not letting her know how much she’d spent.

“The hope is to have a career where you can be in a position, financially, to just do things you want to do because you enjoy the work and not have to worry about the other things,” she told Vogue. “But I’m always like: ‘I will always need to work.’ Because if I don’t work then everything can be gone tomorrow.”

This is not the first time that Zendaya has opened up about being in tune with her mental health, as she previously revealed that she used to struggle with severe anxiety, according to Elle.

According to the post, the former Disney Channel star experienced anxiety when she sang, which she said “stemmed from a bad experience I had while singing on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in 2013”.

At the time, the 25-year-old revealed that she has “tried focusing my energy on other things, like making movies” but that it took time and her slowly building her confidence back up before she was able to go back out on stage to sing live.

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