Gisele Bundchen Reveals How She Overcame Anxiety in Her 20s by Dropping ‘Bad Habits’

It’s no secret Gisele Bündchen knows how to live a healthy life. However, when she was in her 20s, the supermodel admits she used to have a lot of “bad habits” that gave her severe anxiety. To combat this, Gisele, 39, immediately changed her ways.

“It became so unbearable I couldn’t breathe and I thought: ‘I gotta change.’ It wasn’t easy — I had the worst headaches ever because I was withdrawing,” she explained to Vogue Australia on March 2 about drinking too much caffeine and smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. “I felt like I reached rock bottom.”

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Once Gisele realized her “bad habits” were severely impacting her health, she decided to make a change. “So when I stopped having coffee, the mocha frappuccino for breakfast and four cigarettes when I woke up in the morning, I started running. I don’t run anymore, but I ran then because it allowed me to feel my lungs,” the mom to two kids — Benjamin, 10, and Vivian, 7 — explained. “And every time I ran for 20 minutes I was like: ‘OK, I can feel my lungs, OK, I’m not smoking.’”

The former Victoria Secret model also tried “meditating with breathing techniques” so she wouldn’t “feel anxious” — and it worked!

“[Before that] I would get into the elevator and I would feel like I was going to die. So I replaced bad habits with things that were supporting me and I realized that every day I was feeling better,” Gisele revealed.

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By quitting those “bad habits,” Gisele learned a very important lesson. “We are beings of habit and I think you can’t just expect to do something you have always done and stop,” she said. “You have to replace bad habits with good habits.” We couldn’t agree more!