Shailene Woodley recognized and then healed her grief through nature.

“I knew I was depressed when I looked at a tree and didn’t feel anything,” she said in an interview with Outside The magazine came out Tuesday in honor of the publication naming her Outsider of the Year. “That was the lowest point of my life.”

“I felt like I had lost my soul, my self, my happiness, my joy,” she said, seemingly referring to the aftermath of her 2022 split from her fiancé Aaron Rodgers. “I really understood depression and anxiety and, like, complete soul detachment.”

She also lost some of her camping gear in the breakup: “I had to stop at REI and get a new sleeping pad,” she said during the interview, which revolved around a night of camping and a photo shoot. “I left my old one with my ex.”

The person who styled Outside‘s shooting, Woodley’s friend Kris ZeroShe’s also the person Woodley credits with getting her out of trouble, even if it meant doing decidedly unimpressive grunt work.

“Sometimes I was so angry with her,” Woodley said of Zero, who woke her up almost every day by playing music six months after the breakup. “But then we went surfing and for ten minutes that day I thought life might be okay again. Then the depression came back and she said, “We volunteer at the horse ranch!” And we randomly picked a horse farm and cleaned up horse manure. We cleaned the hooves and brushed the horses, and for 20 minutes that day I thought life might be okay again. And then the depression came back and she woke me up the next morning and said, ‘Let’s go for a hike and bring trash bags and clean up the trash!'”

Of course, it takes more than just a woman and physical work to overcome depression – Woodley had her work included, too Three womenthe Showtime-Starz series in which she starred Betty Gilpin, DeWanda WiseAnd Gabrielle Creevey and which aired earlier this year. In January 2023, Woodley told Net-A-Porter that she expressed some of her feelings related to her heartbreak on set.

“Three women I feel like it’s very important – especially, I think, because it was so important to me,” she said. “I’m honored to be a part of it because it truly gave me a North Star at a time in my life when my compass calibration didn’t exist.”