Grey's Anatomy star Sarah Drew says she overcame panic attacks thanks to advice from her dad.
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The actress said his method of "aggressive gratitude" has become "the greatest combatant of fear in my life."
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Drew previously recounted experiencing panic attacks in the wake of filming a harrowing Grey's finale.
Grey's Anatomyalum Sarah Drew is opening up about the life-changing advice that she once received from her dad.
Drew, who spent over a decade portraying the insecure yet highly-capable surgeon Dr. April Kepner, recently recounted her struggle to overcome panic attacks while pregnant with her first child.
"One of the biggest, scariest risks that I leaped into was choosing to become a mom," the actress toldFox Newsin an interview published Saturday. "I took the risk, and I was pregnant. I was probably about six months pregnant, and I had been having panic attacks."
She explained, "I’d been so caught up with anxiety about all of it— I was worried I was going to screw up. I was worried for my kids that I wasn’t going to have the necessary selflessness that’s required. I was worried that I was too self-absorbed to do this well. [I was worried that] I would resent the fact that [my kids] were … demanding things from me."
Drew said she was walking into motherhood with "so many big fears" that the panic attacks kept recurring. Eventually, she turned to her father — a pastor — for guidance.
"I remember writing to my dad and just saying, 'Do you have any advice or any wisdom or any Scripture that you can point me toward that could help combat this fear? Because it’s really overwhelming,'" she recalled.
Drew said her father indeed sent over some Bible verses, but noted that even more helpful was a brief piece of advice he gave her. He told her that the best way to combat all the fear she was experiencing was to embrace "aggressive gratitude."
"I was like, 'Tell me more,'" she recalled. "He calls it 'aggressive' because it’s not always easy when you first start practicing gratitude because sometimes you’re just in a mind spiral, and all you can see is the scary and the dark."
Drew explained, "You’re replacing the scary and the dark with, 'I’m grateful that there is oxygen in my lungs. I am grateful that I have a roof over my head. Look, I have this beautiful meal. I’m so grateful for this. Thank you for this. Thank you for that.’ All of a sudden, your brain chemistry starts to shift."
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She added that it has proven to be "the greatest combatant of fear in my life."
Drew, who is now mother to son Micah Emmanuel (born in 2012) and daughter Hannah Mali Rose (born in 2014), likened aggressive gratitude to rewiring her brain, saying that the approach taught her to immediately look towards good things rather than focusing on all the potential negatives. Now, it has become part of her every day life
"Whenever I’m feeling really scared about something, I go straight to gratitude," Drew shared. "And that generally turns the corner for me. As soon as I start being grateful for things, I start noticing more things to be grateful for, and it transforms."
Drew has previously talked about struggling with panic attacks while filmingGrey's Anatomy— particularly when it came to the mass shooting storyline at the center of the season 6 two-part finale.
"I had nightmares and panic attacks while we were shooting that, even for several days after we finished," Drew said in Lynette Rice's 2021 bookHow to Save a Life: The Inside Story of Grey’s Anatomy,perBusiness Insider.
Drew added, "It was very intense and scary and hard to go to those places and then leave them at the door and then come home and be like, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine. Nobody’s trying to kill me. I didn’t just watch my best friend die. I didn’t just get covered in her blood.'"
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In the two-part episode, a grieving widower named Gary Clark (Michael O'Neill) comes into the hospital with a loaded gun, seeking revenge on a group of doctors that he blames for his wife's death. It proves to be a particularly traumatizing ordeal for April, who is on the team that Clark targets. At one point, she slips on blood and finds her friend Reed (Nora Zehetner) dead in a medical supply closet. Later, she pleads for her life at gunpoint.
Drew said that filming such a frightening situation "does something to your body because your body doesn’t know that it’s not [really] happening."
Read the original article onEntertainment Weekly
