Shailene Woodley recalls losing her hearing, struggling to walk amid ‘conflation’ of health issues

Shailene Woodley provided new details about the “conflation” of health problems she experienced while working on the “Divergent” set in 2013.

The “Big Little Lies” actress began suffering from hearing loss and struggled to walk suddenly while filming the 2014 movie, she said during on Tuesday’s episode of the “She MD” podcast.

“I was losing my hearing. I couldn’t walk for longer than five minutes at a time without having to lay down for hours and hours and hours and sleep. Everything I ate hurt my stomach,” Woodley, 32, told hosts Mary Alice Haney and Dr. Thais Aliabadi of her symptoms, which she experienced throughout her 20s.

Though she’s talked about the illness before, Woodley has never disclosed the cause of her symptoms, saying Tuesday that it felt “like a personal thing.”

She admitted that it was “a confusing process” attempting to figure out what was behind her health problems.

“I’ve always eaten very healthy and I’m very athletic,” Woodley shared. “And so, it was a confusing process for me to go, ‘Well, what am I doing wrong? Why am I passing out every month when I get my period? Why am I hypothyroid?”

“Why am I all of these things?’ And one doctor being like, ‘It’s probably endometriosis.’

And another doctor going, ‘It’s probably this.’ And another one going, ‘It’s probably that.’ ‘You have a tilted uterus. You have a heart-shaped uterus.’

Every person I went to was giving me mixed information, and it set me on my own journey.”

She also admitted that she experienced “a lot of other things” that stemmed from “feeling so much discomfort physically.”

“I’m now suddenly afraid of food. And then body dysmorphia and confusion about identity and feeling safe in my own skin,” she said of her mental symptoms.

The scare ultimately pushed Woodley to “really take a deep look and become introspective” to address her physical and mental health.

“That was, I guess, the path for me, alongside the physical healing, was acknowledging the mental side of the healing process for myself, which involved looking at real traumas and real PTSD that I had experienced at various times in my life, without going into detail about what they were.”

Woodley’s health took “about a decade of unwinding and healing” in order to get healthy again as she took her health “into my own hands” and spent time teaching herself about holistic options. After “approaching it from an internal holistic place,” she said the health issue “ultimately physically resolved itself.”

“And now … I’m not on thyroid medication anymore. I’m not on any medication anymore. My hormones are so balanced. Everything is pumping in the way that it should.” she continued, adding that she is “very healthy now,” she closed.

Woodley first talked about the “debilitating” mystery illness in 2021, revealing that she “said no to a lot of projects” during that time because she “physically couldn’t participate in them.

“And I definitely suffered a lot more than I had to because I didn’t take care of myself. The self-inflicted pressure of not wanting to be helped or taken care of created more physical unrest throughout those years,” she told the Hollywood Reporter.

“It spun me out for a while. You feel so incredibly isolated and alone. Unless someone can see that you have a broken arm or a broken leg, it’s really difficult for people to relate to the pain that you’re experiencing when it’s a silent, quiet, and invisible pain.”