Willow Smith suffers from “extreme anxiety.”
The 20-year-old singer and entertainer has revealed she regularly battles periods of poor mental health and locks herself away in a “cocoon” whenever life overwhelms her.
Speaking to her mother, Jada Pinkett Smith, and grandmother, Adrienne Banfield-Norris, in the family’s latest episode of “Red Table Talk,” she said: “Four days ago, I was having extreme anxiety. I couldn’t talk, I had to just cocoon and like be with myself for a moment.
“That was so important because it would have been so much more intense if I had been looking to you to be like, ‘Help me!’
“And then, when I was ready, I opened the cocoon.”
In the episode, which aired on Tuesday (December 22nd), Willow, Jada, and Adrienne talk to suicide attempt survivors, who speak out about their experiences and what helped them make it through, and the “Whip My Hair” hitmaker also revealed she understands the difficulty of dealing with an emotional crisis, and how lonely it can be to struggle with anxiety and other mental health issues.
She added, “There’s shame, there’s guilt, there’s sadness and confusion. And then you don’t even want to talk about it because you’re like, ‘I feel crazy, and I don’t want them to think I’m crazy so I’m just not gonna say anything’.”