Gisele Bündchen says she felt ‘suffocated’ and had self-destructive thoughts from stress of modeling

By Dan Heching, CNN

(CNN) — Gisele Bündchen says that living the life of a top supermodel created so much stress, it was almost too much to bear.

Bündchen spoke with Lee Cowan for a televised interview to air on Sunday for CBS News Sunday Morning, in which she likened her experiences to being “in tunnels.”

“I couldn’t breathe. And then I started being in studios, and I felt, like, suffocated,” Bündchen shared. “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.”

She continued to describe her feelings, saying, “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 her.

“Yeah. For, like, a second,” Bündchen replied.

Elsewhere in the interview, the former Victoria’s Secret Angel described her frenetic lifestyle at the time.

While “everybody looked at me from the outside and thought I had it all,” Bündchen said she was “drinking mocha Frappuccinos for breakfast with three cigarettes, (and) drinking a bottle of wine at night to calm down from all the coffee I was drinking.”

In addition, she said she was “not sleeping and traveling and working – like I basically burned down my adrenal glands, and my nervous system couldn’t take it anymore.”

The Brazilian-born Bündchen recently told People that recent “curve balls” she’s faced in her life – including her divorce from football legend Tom Brady – were “very tough” on her family.

“It’s been a lot — in every area of my life,” she said earlier this week.

“I feel like whenever it rains, it pours. With all the different twists and turns that life takes, all we can do is the best we can given what happens in our surroundings,” she added.

Bündchen and Brady jointly announced in October 2022 that they were divorcing after 13 years of marriage, both stressing that co-parenting their kids is a shared priority.

Bündchen and their two children have since settled in Miami, where she said they’ve transitioned back into public schools, have taken on new hobbies and are thriving.

“It makes me proud to see how they’re all becoming their own little individual selves, but how their principles and their values are so strong. It makes me so happy to see that, they’re flourishing into their own beings,” she said.

Bündchen has also found solace in the wellness space, prioritizing her self-care by meditating, exercising and eating healthy as a means to find balance.

“I think if I didn’t have all the different tools that I have to support me during these times, it would’ve been very hard,” she said.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2023 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.

CNN’s Alli Rosenbloom contributed to this report.