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you want to get Kristen Bell’s attention, might I suggest you transform into a fitness ball or a nutritional supplement, a back stretcher or a muscle roller on social media. “If I see it, I’m getting it,” the 39-year-old says of what could generally be referred to as wellness Instagram. “I can’t tell you how susceptible I am to it—I just want to try everything.”

It’s how she wound up with, to date, Yamuna Balls, resistance bands, gliding discs, foam rollers, KeVita drinks, Moon Juice Dust, powdered camel milk, Sun Potion adaptogens, and something called the Chirp Wheel+. “That algorithm works,” Kristen says, biting into a spinach salad at a café in Los Angeles.

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“I’m loving the fact that if we ever get attacked by ninjas, I would be a valuable asset.”

We’ve just come from a grueling Pilates class at Studio Metamorphosis next door, where the star of this month’s Frozen II alternated between singing and grunting through planks, pikes, and lunges, and in one instance, gripped the high bars of the reformer and suspended her frame above the machine in a V shape.

Kristen is a muscular 5'1½", but until this past year, she had never done one workout consistently. About a year ago, however, she found what she likes to call “Studio Morph,” and for the first time in her life, she fell in love with exercise.

“I’ve always felt mentally strong because I’m adept and can banter and hold my own in a good conversation,” says Kristen. “But I’ve never felt physically strong. I felt waifish…or pregnant. And I’m loving the fact that if we ever get attacked by ninjas, I would be a valuable asset.”

Ideally, she makes it to a class three times a week, usually with a friend. (After she brought writers from The Good Place, one texted her: “Kristen, what hospital do you typically go to after this class?”) It’s a challenging workout that incorporates cardio, circuit training, and CrossFit elements, and its benefits for Kristen are numerous.

“It’s about the muscle in my body. Having children obliterated my abdominal wall,” she says of giving birth to daughters Lincoln, 6, and Delta, 4. “Good night. That’s a wrap. And I thought, Well, it’s never going to come back. What do I need it for? I’m married. Spanx exist. You don’t get everything all the time.”

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But the abs she had in her 20s have returned, along with muscles she’s never seen before. “I feel so much stronger, and it’s a physical feeling, but it’s also a mental one,” Kristen says. She self-mandates exercise for mental health. “It should be the first stop for anyone who experiences depression or anxiety because it encourages serotonin and endorphins. I feel so much more centered, patient, capable. It sets the next 48 hours for me.”

Here’s what those hours look like. Kristen wakes, makes matcha with Ripple pea milk, drops the kids off at school, and then heads to the set. She’s insistent about working only on projects that shoot in L.A. “It’s too disruptive to my family [otherwise], and that’s what gives me the fuel to even be creative at all. If I had to choose, I’d choose them.”

Once on-set—most recently for the Veronica Mars reboot on Hulu and the final season of The Good Place—Kristen orders egg whites, spinach, tomato, and extra feta from craft services. Her midmorning snack is a salt bagel with cream cheese, and she likes to announce every day that it is bagel day.

“I have to eat carbs because I have to
memorize 11 pages of dialogue, and I can’t do that eating spinach and chicken.”

Just before lunch she shakes up a pea or hemp milk protein shake (usually with the Instagram adaptogens). For lunch, the vegetarian has a “garbage disposal salad”—lettuce, avocados, raisins, carrots, blue cheese, cucumbers.

“I’m not super restrictive. If they make au gratin potatoes, I’m going to have some, but I am mindful of the portion I take,” she says. “I find that through conscious eating, I’m able to have all the rewards and also maintain a healthy, steady diet.

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dinner, with an assist from her sister-in-law, who helps her shop and prep, Kristen will make something like Banza chickpea pasta with cherry tomatoes and olive oil.

When I ask if, given her household’s busy work schedules (including husband Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast and their joint venture, Hello Bello, a line of natural baby products), they have someone preparing meals for them, she balks. “I get too much joy out of cooking,” she says. “I wouldn’t actually feel comfortable coming home and having a meal served to me.”

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Kristen chalks up many of the couple’s daily proclivities to the fact that they are both from Michigan. Dax shops at the affordable chain grocery store and not the bougie purveyor of natural foods, for example, “because we’re from Michigan.” They wanted a basement—a rarity in L.A. real estate—“because we’re from the Midwest.”

Michigan was also the setting where, after not drinking for 10 years (“When I do drink, it’s like I have the flu the next day”), Kristen “discovered rosé” this summer and had a glass every day on vacation.

It is Dax, Kristen says—one of many moments she praises his intellect—who first suggested she talk about anxiety and depression for an interview at the end of a long press tour, when she had run out of things to chat about.

I ask if she was hesitant about going public with the condition she’s struggled with since age 18. “Yes, for the first 10 minutes,” she says. “I realized that this is the shame that prevents people from talking about it. I immediately felt irresponsible, because I do care about depression not being taboo, yet I present this bubbly, outgoing girl who seemingly gets through life with a smile on her face, and I’d never discussed that some days, I don’t.”

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Since then, Kristen has taken every opportunity to shed light on mental health. She takes an SSRI antidepressant every day that helps with what she describes as “waves of serotonin imbalance.”

As we leave Pilates, she squeezes a dropper of CBD oil onto her tongue. Taking the oil daily has turned off her mental to-do list that was on constant loop. Meanwhile, she credits adaptogens (herbs whose efficacy for stress reduction is still being studied) with smoothing out her physical reaction to cortisol spikes.

She goes to therapy occasionally but relies mostly on a “toolbox” she and Dax received when they went to sessions early in their relationship. It’s how they’ve created helpful rules—like if she’s in a down mood, she’ll tell him she’s going to be quiet for a bit, so he knows her silence isn’t aimed at him.

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I’d heard Kristen talk in interviews about mornings when she would wake up and feel weighed down by gloom, unable to get out of bed. What did she do in those moments? I ask her, knowing there are kids and scripts and camel milk packages to unbox.

Kristen notes that she feels fortunate because that darkness doesn’t come on as frequently as it used to— having kids helped her “step off the hamster wheel of checking the feed of my life.” But if she does experience a bleakness, she reaches for wisdom from Dax’s AA meetings. “You just have to do the next right thing. You just stand up. That’s the next right thing. Then you brush your teeth. That’s the next right thing. It’s very one-step-at-a-time.”

Kristen is ready and generous with this advice because she wants to help people, and also because she is constantly tussling with what it means to be a good human. To that end, she works on behalf of dozens of philanthropies and regularly features teachers’ wish lists on her Instagram.

While she is tipping $100 on our $37 lunch, she tells me, only half-jokingly, that she thinks Lin-Manuel Miranda—with his purpose-driven optimism—should lead us. “I’m like, what are my marching orders?” she says. Lin-Manuel came to her birthday party as a human gift from Good Place costar D’Arcy Carden, and it makes sense that a humanitarian Broadway star was just what Kristen wanted.

Did you sing together? I ask. “No, I was trying to play it super cool,” she says. “‘Thank you for coming—I just discovered rosé last week.’”



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This article originally appeared in the November 2019 issue of Women’s Health. Pick up an issue on newsstands October 15.

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