Reese Witherspoon has credited a hypnotist with helping her to manage her "high anxiety" and "bad panic attacks".

During an interview for the Las Culturistas podcast on Wednesday, the Legally Blonde actress revealed that she had tried meditation and medication to try and treat her anxiety issues in the past.

But it wasn't until she hired a hypnotist that she discovered the tools that "changed my whole life".

"I'm a high-anxiety person," she told co-hosts Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers. "It can be really highly performance-based. Like, you have to perform. You have to show up, which is a lot of my anxiety. I used to have panic attacks, bad panic attacks, like crying."

Reese went on to reveal that she has struggled with some symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and tried taking benzodiazepine medication Ativan, also known as Lorazepam, when she was 34 but it made her "feel like a zombie".

"I wasn't performing at the level I wanted to, and I wasn't as funny. P.S. If you need medicine, please take the medicine... I'm not a doctor," the 49-year-old advised. "I started doing some work with a hypnotist, and she actually works for this thing called Neuro-linguistic programming. So, it's called NLP. And she helped me realise that I was going to get the same result, but I could get rid of all the anxiety in the middle."

NLP, which asserts a connection between neurological processes and behavioural patterns, is sometimes used to treat phobias, depression, and learning disorders.

Elsewhere in the chat, Reese described how she has discovered how to take the "stress out" of situations.

"(I'll do an exercise) where you talk to yourself after you've completed the task. You've done this show. You're walking backstage... and you're happy. And so, you kind of just tell yourself ahead of time, we're gonna get there. The way I process it is actually who I am and how I show up as a leader," she explained.

Reese is currently promoting the fourth season of The Morning Show, which is now airing on Apple TV+.