He's her husband of seven years, he's the father of her children... and he's her babysitter while she does drugs.
It seems like Kristen Bell spent her last birthday in the good place, thanks to her husband Dax Shepard.
The Frozen star revealed that she experimented with psychedelic mushrooms last year to try to help with her depression and anxiety, and she shared her experience on Sean Hayes' podcast HypochondriActor on May 12.
She said that she read Michael Pollan's book How to Change Your Mind, explaining, "He really goes into detail about this underground academic community that has continued to study the effects of LSD and psilocybin on what they call 'healthy normals.'"
Bell noted, "There are aspects to those two particular drugs that the places you can go in your brain are much deeper and more healing than anything else."
She then became "really interested in doing mushrooms" to "feel what kind of doors open" and "have a trip that was my own."
Fortunately for her, she is married to the right guy for the job. "I am very lucky to be married to an ex-drug addict," Bell joked of Shepard. "Not only did he know where to get the mushrooms… he got that really nice quality, organic, set and setting, beautiful mushroom. And then he, um, babysat me."
She recalled the conversation she had with the father of her two daughters, during which she laid out her instructions for the occasion. "I said, ‘I really would like to experience this. And I don't want to, I'm not going to party with it, but I want to know what this feels like. And I want to talk while I'm doing it, and I want you to talk to me.' And he took me on a walk around the neighborhood and it was so lovely," the actress, 40, shared.
One highlight for her was how "enamored" she was with her own body.
"I had gone to the bathroom, I went to pee and I came downstairs wide-eyed," she reflected. "And I said, ‘Dax, I had to pee. I felt the sensation of having to pee and all of a sudden this beautiful lady'—and I was pointing to my legs—‘picked me up. She walked me down the hallway. She sat me down on the toilet. She rolled a little roll of toilet paper for me and just put it on my lap till I was done peeing. Then she wiped me. Then she flushed the toilet and now I'm back out here.'"
For Bell, it was a reminder of how we should appreciate our bodies. As she put it, "And in my head, I had separated this body that had done so much good in my life, that has taken me through happiness and pain and workouts and laziness and I was just like, couldn't stop touching my legs, going, ‘You're so strong. You're so elegant.' "
The Veronica Mars alum said her anxiety and depression still comes in waves, sharing that she can get "irritable" around fans or if she works on set early in the morning. If that's the case, she tries to "slow down" and tell herself to "be here right now."