Gisele Bündchen says she had panic attacks and once thought about jumping during her modeling days
- Gisele Bündchen told CBS she once thought about jumping.
- Bündchen added that she used to have panic attacks and felt "suffocated" in studios.
Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen said that when she was a young model, she once thought about jumping from a height.
"You know, I was in tunnels. I couldn't breathe. And then I started being in studios, and I felt, like, suffocated," Bündchen told CBS correspondent Lee Cowan about her panic attacks, in an interview that aired on Sunday.
"I lived on the 9th floor, and I had to go up the stairs because I was afraid I would be stuck on the elevator, and I'd be hyperventilating," Bündchen added. "You know when you can't breathe even when the windows are open, you feel like, I don't want to live like this, you know what I mean?"
"Did you really think about jumping?" Cowan asked Bündchen.
"Yeah. For, like, a second," she replied.
Earlier in the interview, Bündchen attributed her poor mental health to the stress she faced at the time.
"You know, drinking mocha frappuccinos for breakfast with three cigarettes, drinking a bottle of wine at night to calm down from all the coffee I was drinking," Bündchen told CBS. "Not sleeping and traveling and working."
"Like, I basically burned out my adrenal glands and my nervous system couldn't take it anymore," she added.
Bündchen previously wrote about having suicidal thoughts in her 2018 memoir.
"The idea swept over me then: Maybe it will be easier if I just jump. It will be all over. I can get out of this," wrote Bündchen, according to an excerpt published by Page Six.
"When I think back on that moment, and that 23-year-old girl, I want to cry. I want to tell her that everything will be all right, that she hasn't even begun to live her life. But in that moment, the only answer seemed to be to jump," she continued.
Bündchen also went through a highly publicized divorce from her ex-husband, Tom Brady in October 2022.
Bündchen told CBS that while she was disappointed that her marriage to Brady had ended, she still wished him well.
"I mean, it's not what I dreamed of and what I hoped for," Bündchen told Cowan. "My parents have been married for 50 years, and I really wanted that to happen."
"But I think you have to accept, you know, sometimes that the way you are in your 20s, it's sometimes you grow together, sometimes you grow apart," she continued.
Representatives for Bündchen did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider sent outside regular business hours.