Olivia Munn Said Her Postpartum Anxiety Felt Like “The Entire Ocean” Was On Top Of Her

Olivia Munn has really gone through massive changes in the past few years. She became a mom to her son Malcolm, who she shares with boyfriend John Mulaney, and then underwent a double mastectomy last year when she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer. All of which would be an incredible amount of change to handle, but Munn also struggled with postpartum anxiety after Malcolm’s birth.

In a recent interview with Kelly Clarkson, Munn opened up about her experience with postpartum anxiety, a condition that causes new moms to worry excessively and continues to go largely undiagnosed as it tends to be an invisible issue. The Cleveland Clinic explains, “If you have postpartum anxiety, the worry can be all-consuming or make you feel worried all day and all night. It often causes you to have irrational fears or excessive worries about events that are unlikely to happen.”

While Munn was aware of and said she was “prepared” for postpartum depression, she said she had never heard of this condition. “Postpartum anxiety was something I had never heard about, and it hit me like the entire ocean was on top of me,” Munn told Clarkson. “It was unbelievably difficult.”

The Office Party star started to experience postpartum anxiety one month after welcoming Malcolm, who’s now 2, and recalled waking up at 4 a.m. with a tight chest that “stayed tight all day long. And then for a whole year, every day at 4 a.m. my eyes would pop open and I would be gasping for air.”

This is not the first time Munn has opened up about her postpartum anxiety. She told People in April that she was “not prepared for the kind of postpartum that I had” and described the feeling as a “tunnel of anxiety and darkness,” a tunnel she stayed in for a year.

For Munn, her postpartum anxiety came to an end when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2023, telling Clarkson that “facing death” helped her to move on from this awful condition in a way that was not possible for her before. “I couldn’t climb a mountain carrying all this extra weight,” she explained. “And when I got to the end of it, I didn't want to pick it back up again.”

Munn documented her cancer recovery on social media, and she did so with her son Malcolm in mind, telling Good Morning America recently, “If I didn’t make it, I wanted my son when he got older to know that I fought to be here. That I tried my best.”