{"id":37645,"date":"2025-11-04T05:31:29","date_gmt":"2025-11-04T05:31:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/reese-witherspoon-says-being-anxious-was-her-biggest-career-advantage\/"},"modified":"2025-11-04T05:31:29","modified_gmt":"2025-11-04T05:31:29","slug":"reese-witherspoon-says-being-anxious-was-her-biggest-career-advantage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/reese-witherspoon-says-being-anxious-was-her-biggest-career-advantage\/","title":{"rendered":"Reese Witherspoon says being anxious was her biggest career advantage"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/69096263599d46a4ccc16371?format=jpeg\" alt=\"Reese Witherspoon.\"\/><figcaption>Reese Witherspoon says her anxiety and the pressure she put on herself to perform played a major role in her professional success.<\/p>\n<p>TheStewartofNY\/WireImage<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>Reese Witherspoon says the pressure she put on herself helped her find career success.<\/li>\n<li>&quot;I was probably successful because I had so much anxiety. They go hand in hand,&quot; she said.<\/li>\n<li>Despite her achievements, Witherspoon said that there were still people in the industry who doubted her abilities.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Reese Witherspoon, 49, is an Oscar-winning actor and a leading Hollywood producer. She says the relentless pressure she put on herself is the reason behind her professional success.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I was probably successful because I had so much anxiety. They go hand in hand,&quot; Witherspoon told Harper&#039;s Bazaar in an interview published Monday.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I had pressured myself to extreme levels to show up at work in a perfect way. We all now know \u2014 perfect is not attainable. It&#039;s not sustainable. I stressed myself out in service of my job, and it got me really, really far. I&#039;m rewarded for my anxiety and perfectionism,&quot; she said.<\/p>\n<p>But now that she&#039;s getting older, the &quot;Legally Blonde&quot; star says she&#039;s learning to slow down and be content with what she&#039;s already achieved.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I mean, I&#039;ve had an abundance of good fortune, great work opportunities, and worked with some of the greatest people on Earth,&quot; she said.<\/p>\n<p>Witherspoon began acting at a young age, landing her first major acting role in &quot;The Man in the Moon&quot; in 1991. She went on to star in a string of films over the next twodecade<strong>s<\/strong> before turning her attention to producing, with notable projects including &quot;Gone Girl&quot; and &quot;Wild.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>In 2016, she founded a media company called Hello Sunshine. Since 2019, she&#039;s been producing and starring in Apple TV&#039;s &quot;The Morning Show,&quot; alongside Jennifer Aniston.<\/p>\n<p>Despite her box-office success, Witherspoon said that others in the industry still doubted her abilities.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Even when &#039;Gone Girl&#039; and &#039;Wild&#039; had grossed over $600 million at the box office and I got three Oscars, it still wasn&#039;t a guarantee that I could get things made,&quot; Witherspoon said. &quot;People were still questioning whether I was a real producer or was just doing it as a vanity project.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>This isn&#039;t the first time that Witherspoon has talked about how anxiety has impacted her work.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking on the &quot;Las Culturistas&quot; podcast in September, Witherspoon told hosts Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang that she&#039;s &quot;a high-anxiety person.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;It can be really highly performance-based,&quot; Witherspoon said. &quot;Like, you have to perform. You have to show up, which is a lot of my anxiety. I used to have panic attacks, bad panic attacks, like crying.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>A representative for Witherspoon did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent by Business Insider outside regular hours.<\/p>\n<p>She also isn&#039;t the only Hollywood star who&#039;s credited anxiety with pushing them forward.<\/p>\n<p>In January 2024, Emma Stone told NPR that she sees her anxiety &quot;as a kind of a superpower.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;And if you can use it for productive things, if you can use all of those feelings in those synapses that are firing for something creative, or something that you&#039;re passionate about, or something interesting, anxiety is like rocket fuel because you can&#039;t help but get out of bed and do things, do things, do things because you&#039;ve got all of this energy within you,&quot; Stone said.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking to People in May 2024, Ryan Reynolds said he&#039;s learned to use his anxiety as an advantage at work.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;My job benefits greatly,&quot; Reynolds said. &quot;People who have anxiety are constantly thinking into the future. You&#039;re constantly, &#039;What if this happens? What if that happens?&#039; You&#039;re always telling yourself stories.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Reese Witherspoon says her anxiety and the pressure she put on herself to perform played a major role in her professional success. TheStewartofNY\/WireImage Reese Witherspoon says the pressure she put on herself helped her find career success. &quot;I was probably successful because I had so much anxiety. They go hand in hand,&quot; she said. Despite [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":37646,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-37645","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37645"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37645\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}