Before he made it big, Stephen Colbert suffered from anxiety and had a “bit of a” nervous breakdown about his career.
“I needed to be medicated when I was younger to deal with my anxiety that I had thrown my life away by attempting to do something that so few people actually get away with, or succeed at,” he said in an interview with Rolling Stone published Wednesday.
He revealed he was prescribed Xanax for a little while.
“And then I realized that the gears were still smoking,” the 54-year-old “Late Night” host said. “I just couldn’t hear them anymore. But I could feel them, I could feel the gearbox heating up and smoke pouring out of me, but I was no longer walking around a couch. I had a bit of a nervous breakdown after I got married [to wife Evelyn in 1993] — kind of panic attacks. My wife would go off to work and she’d come home — because I worked at night — and I’d be walking around the couch. And she’s like, ‘How was your day?’ And I’d say, ‘You’re looking at it.’ Just tight circles around the couch.”
Colbert was 29 at this time and still working at Second City in Chicago when his friends Paul Dinello and Amy Sedaris left the show to move to New York.
“I was left onstage with a show that we had created together,” he said. “I did a year of that show. And I was in such a weird panic that I would never create anything new again.”
He continued, “I would go to the show, and I would curl up in a ball on the couch backstage and I would wait to hear my cue lines. Then I would uncurl and go onstage and I’d feel fine. Which occurred to me at the time: Like, ‘Oh, you feel fine when you’re out here.’ And then as soon as I got offstage, I’d just crumble into a ball again. Nobody ever asked me what was wrong!”
Colbert stopped taking Xanax and started performing more and more, which he credits with easing his anxiety.
“Creating something is what helped me from just spinning apart like an unweighted flywheel,” he said. “And I haven’t stopped since. Even when I was a writer I always had to be in front of a camera a little bit. I have to perform.”