Millie Bobby Brown has a monk to thank for helping her overcome a three-month anxiety attack.
The Stranger Thingsactress, 22, opened up about how she was able to move past a “traumatizing” experience during a trip to Japan on the Monday, July 13, episode of the On Purpose With Jay Shetty podcast.
Brown revealed that after being “chased” by people in public, she felt like she “shut down” with anxiety for three months.
“It was a really traumatizing 20 minutes. It was very intense, very scary,” she recalled. “I feel like I shut down, and I shut down for three months. In that moment, something switched in my mind.”
It was only when Brown took a trip to Japan with husband Jake Bongiovi, 24, that she found an unexpected release. The Enola Holmes 3 actress said she met “one amazing Japanese gentleman” at a Kyoto retreat inhabited by monks, who “was just so calm and almost felt like he saw me.”
“I was in the height of my anxiety at this point. He knew that I was kind of broken,” she recalled, adding, “He was like, ‘We need to meditate,’ and I was like, ‘OK.'”
She continued, “We meditated in this garden for five minutes. I meditated with 50 people. It was not just us—it was a bunch of tourists like us. And it was amazing, and I will never forget the feeling.”
While it was Bongiovi’s birthday, Brown said she felt like she was the one who had received “the biggest gift of all,” which was “peace in [her] heart.”
“My husband literally said, ‘You radiated this light after,'” she remembered. “It was exactly what I needed.”
Looking back on the encounter with the monk, Brown said, “I’m a believer in divine intervention, and I think that was a moment where God was like, ‘You need to take a break and sit there and figure out what’s going on in your head.’ I think that healed me in a lot of ways.”
This story was originally published by Parade on Jul 14, 2026, where it first appeared in the News section. Add Parade as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
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