Jennifer Lopez Opens up About Panic Attack That Forced Her to Change Her Life

Jennifer Lopez is opening up about the mental health moment that caused her to shift her focus to wellness. The 52-year-old singer and actress revealed it was early in her career that she learned burning the candle at both ends wouldn’t work for her in a new issue of her On The JLo newsletter.

Recalling a time in her “late 20s” when she was only sleeping between three and five hours a night, Lopez wrote, “I’d be on set all day and in the studio all night and doing junkets and filming videos on the weekends. I was in my late 20s and I thought I was invincible. Until one day, I was sitting in a trailer, and all the work and the stress it brought with it, coupled with not enough sleep to recuperate mentally, caught up with me.”

The Halftime star remembered going from feeling “totally normal” to feeling like she couldn’t move at all. “I had made my work such an all-consuming priority and let my own self-care needs go completely (even as simple as sleeping or taking ten minutes to just relax),” she shared. “I found myself feeling physically paralyzed, I couldn’t see clearly and then the physical symptoms I was having started to scare me and the fear compounded itself.”

Looking back, Lopez can see that she suffered a “classic panic attack brought on by exhaustion,” but at the time, she didn’t know what was happening. “My security guard on set came in and picked me up and drove me to the doctor,” the Hustlers star continued. “By the time I got there, I could at least speak again and I was so terrified I thought I was losing my mind. I asked the doctor if I was going crazy. He said, ‘No, you’re not crazy.”

The doctor advised Lopez that she needed to be sleeping seven to nine hours of sleep a night, abstain from caffeine and get in her workouts if she would be expending herself so much physically. “I realized how serious the consequences could be of ignoring what my body and mind needed to be healthy – and that’s where my journey to wellness began,” she continued.

Now, the Marry Me star said she’s concentrated on “pro-living versus anti-aging,” a central tenant of which is sleep. “You lay down and you go into a space where you preserve yourself and then you come out a new, younger person than you were before,” she said of sleep’s effect. “Sometimes I wake up and say, ‘Wow! I just lost 10 years off my face!’ That’s what a good night’s sleep can do for you, and it accumulates over time.”