Emma Stone Reveals Past Panic Attacks

Emma Stone Reveals Past Panic Attacks, The star says the problem “immobilized” her as a kid and came back during her latest film shoots. Actress Emma Stone may have risen to fame playing spunky and gregarious characters like the feisty aspiring journalist in “The Help” or the freshman lawyer who makes a womanizer change his ways in “Crazy, Stupid, Love.,” but, in the July issue of Vogue, she reveals she turned reclusive as a kid thanks to panic attacks, the first of which she suffered at the age of eight. “I was just kind of immobilized by it,” she tells the magazine. “I didn’t want to go to my friends’ houses or hang out with anybody, and nobody really understood.”

Her parents put her in therapy, but Stone, who grew up in Scottsdale, Arizona, eventually found something else that helped — acting. At 11 she started getting involved in improv comedy … and the experience changed her life forever. “It gave me a sense of purpose. I wanted to make people laugh,” she explains. “Comedy was my sport. It taught me how to roll with the punches. Failure is the exact same as success when it comes to comedy because it just keeps coming. It never stops.”

The panic attacks haven’t stopped either, still creeping up now and then, even during her now-famous scene in “Crazy, Stupid, Love,” where Ryan Gosling lifts her up high above his head ballroom-style a la “Dirty Dancing,” she admits. To avoid the attacks while shooting “Spider-Man,” she took an unusual approach — baking. “I think I felt really out of control of my surroundings. I was just baking all the time. There were stacks of things in the kitchen that nobody could possibly go through,” Stone, 23, explains. “It seemed like it made me feel, if I put these in, I’ll know what the outcome is … I was overbaking.”