Gisele Bündchen Discusses How She Contemplated Suicide
In a new interview with CBS Sunday Morning, Gisele Bundchen says, “I’m in a different place in my life. I’m able to choose more of what I want. I think before I was more surviving, and now I’m living, which is different.” Stepping back from the fashion world, the supermodel wants to fully be herself. Not the “spotlight-loving personality” you might think. Embracing her Cancer traits, Gisele, 43, says, “I’m a little crab, I like my home.”
As an introvert, modeling was challenging for Bundchen. She found herself drinking a mocha Frappuccino with three cigarettes for breakfast, then a bottle of wine at night to calm down from all the coffee she was drinking. On top of that, she hardly slept, traveled often, and worked a lot. “I basically burned down my adrenal glands, and my nervous system couldn’t take it anymore.” However, Gisele felt ashamed to tell people what she was going through because they placed her on such a high pedestal, she thought they wouldn’t understand.
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Reflecting on how her anxiety started to present itself at this time, Gisele recalled having to take the stairs to her ninth-floor apartment. She was afraid she would be stuck on the elevator and hyperventilating. “Because if you know you can’t breathe even if your windows are open, you feel like, ‘I don’t want to live like this.'” Host Lee Cowan asked a teary-eyed Gisele if she really thought about jumping, ending her life, and she responded, “Yeah, for like a second. You know, because you’re like, ‘I can’t!'” To move past this, Gisele stopped everything in a single day — completely detoxing from caffeine, sugar, and most of her drinking. She also took up a new morning ritual: meditation. Now, the mom of two wakes up at 5 a.m. to “greet the sun.”
In 2018, she told People that she “actually had the feeling of, ‘If I just jump off my roof, this is going to end, and I never have to worry about this feeling of my world closing in.'” Reflecting back on that 23-year-old girl, Gisele said, “In that moment, the only answer seemed to be to jump.”
Watch the full interview below: