Jennifer Lopez suffered a serious health crisis when she “overworked” herself early in her career.
During her apearance on the “SmartLess” podcast Monday, Lopez said she “didn’t realize my limits” in the early 2000s, and after working “98 days in a row without taking a day off,” she ended up in the hospital with scary symptoms.
“When I was doing ‘Enough,’ I think I had done like four movies in a row, and I had recorded my second album or something like that, so the ‘JLo’ album, which was really big,” she explained.
The 56-year-old star described how she’d film all day, go to the studio at night and do junkets and video shoots on weekends during the busy time.
But eventually, Lopez’s exhaustion caught up with her one day on the set of 2002’s “Enough.”
“Every time I walk to the set, I start getting a little pitter-patter in my heart; it’s like rising,” she said. “And finally, it got to the point I was like, I really feel nervous.’”
Lopez said she told her young co-star Tessa Allen that she felt “a little weird” from being “tired” and knew she “wasn’t alright.”
“I went back to the trailer, and I sat down, and all of a sudden, I just couldn’t see,” Lopez divulged. “It was almost like I couldn’t see clearly, like something just went over my eyes, and I couldn’t move.”
The “Dance Again” singer, who said she felt “paralyzed” in the moment, asked for help from her friend and then-assistant, Arlene, who got Lopez’s security guard to take her to the hospital.
“I said to the doctor, I said, ‘Am I going crazy?” Lopez recalled. “And he said, ‘No. You’re not crazy.’”
Lopez was a busy actress in the early 2000s thanks to her films “The Cell,” The Wedding Planner,” “Angel Eyes” and “Maid in Manhattan” that all came out before “Enough.”
In the following two years, she starred in “Gigli,” “Jersey Girl,” “Shall We Dance?” and “Monster-in-Law.”
She also put out three albums between 2001 and 2005.
On “SmartLess,” Lopez said the moment she realized her “anonymity was gone” was when a fan aggressively approached her on the street, and she thought she was being mugged.
“I thought, ‘You can’t get that back. That’s something that lasts forever,’ Lopez said. “And I remember that’s when I started having panic attacks.”
Lopez added that it took her time to realize her “life had changed in a way you couldn’t control anymore.”
