Navya with mom Shweta Bachchan Nanda (courtesy shwetabachchan)

New Delhi:

Amitabh Bachchan’s granddaughter Navya Naveli Nanda opened up about battling anxiety in a recent video shared by Aara Health, the healthcare portal she co-founded recently. Navya began by saying that she started going to therapy after “hitting rock bottom”. Later in the video, she said that she wasn’t comfortable about sharing her mental health experience before. Speaking to her friend about attending therapy, Navya said: “I went fairly recently, like you said that you realise when you hit rock bottom… I feel like I hit rock bottom multiple times and I just couldn’t figure out why. I was like ‘Okay, obviously something has to change, I need to talk about it’. I think it helped coming to that conclusion. Now once a week I am in that routine and I don’t think I am even close to hitting rock bottom because I have everything in control, I am talking to someone. Now I can identify what are the things that even get me to hit rock bottom. People realise too late sometimes that they need to get help.”

“I go for like severe anxiety. I get really bad anxiety sometimes and I just don’t know why – there’s no one reason. I could be outside and it just kicks in. You don’t have control of it,” Navya added. 23-year-old Navya, daughter of Shweta Bachchan and Nikhil Nanda, graduated from New York’s Fordham University earlier this year. She has a younger brother named Agastya.

Navya, who goes to therapy for an hour every week, also shared how talking to a therapist has helped her deal with anxiety: “I think I learnt self-awareness actually by going to therapy, like I had none even before I went there. A lot of times I felt that I was getting anxious, like I was getting this anxiety because of outside factors but after doing therapy, it was like 80 per cent was in my head. I didn’t even need a trigger on the outside to set it off. I just needed to be more self aware about my own emotions. My body – what I like and what I don’t like, it has nothing to do with the outside once you figure out what’s really wrong. And I think that really helped.”

Navya said being around “positive, energetic” people has helped her be in a better mental space: “There have been times in my life when I haven’t been surrounded by positive people and I have seen how negatively it has impacted the way that I think. Not just about myself but about the world. I have learnt from then on that I am only going to surround myself with people who make me feel good and happy.”

Watch the video here, in which Navya speaks to the co-founders of Aara Health.

Launched earlier this year, Aara Health is described as a “platform for women that aims to empower, educate and diagnose in a confidential, safe and reliable manner.”