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Emma Stone, the La la Land actress many times has candidly opened up about her dealings with anxiety in several interviews.

Stone in 2017, in an interview on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert mentioned about her anxiety and panic attacks.

Her childhood saw a series of experiences where she went through severe mental health distress. She said, she was 7 years old when she experienced her first panic attack: "I was at a friend's house, and all of a sudden I was just sitting in her room, and I had this deep, knowing that the house was on fire, despite all evidence to the contrary”.

"I started taking therapy, I think around age 8, because it was getting really hard for me to leave the house to go to school," she said. "I sort of lived in fear of these panic attacks.”

As reported by NPR, The Poor Things actress could recall her haunting experience of anxiety, when she felt like her chest was tightening and she immediately called her mother.

Stone said over the years she had overcome it and now the situation is a little better.

“I still have anxiety to this day but not panic attacks”, she said as reported by BBC.

Emma always thought she would never be able to leave her native, Arizona. But when she was around 15, her breakthrough happened in acting career and she reached the heights of Hollywood.

The massive separation anxiety that took over her was when she was separated from her mother. She always had a feeling that something might happen to her mom.

She went through a phase where it was immensely difficult for her to make her believe that nothing of these are real. Every situation where she was away from her mother felt ordeal to her, that fear never let her live freely.

She faced her anxiety challenges with a lot of mental strength based approach, which she referred to as “superpowers”. Emma said, “Just because we might have a funny thing going on in our amygdala, and our fight-or-flight response is maybe a little bit out of whack in comparison to many people's brain chemistry, it doesn't make it wrong.” She adds, “It doesn't make it bad. It just means we have these tools to manage. And if you can use it for productive things, if you can use all of those feelings in those synapses”.

On The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, she brought a drawing which showed a little Emma and a green monster, which for her was the “anxiety”.

What is anxiety?
According to the American Psychological Association, it is an an emotion characterized by apprehension and somatic symptoms of tension in which an individual anticipates impending danger, catastrophe, or misfortune.

The body often mobilizes itself to meet the perceived threat: muscles become tense, breathing is faster, and the heart beats more rapidly.

Anxiety may be distinguished from fear both conceptually and physiologically, although the two terms are often used interchangeably.

Anxiety is considered a future-oriented, long-acting response broadly focused on a diffuse threat, whereas fear is an appropriate, present-oriented, and short-lived response to a clearly identifiable and specific threat.