Reese Witherspoon "cried and cried" after realising she felt like a "broken robot" and "wasn't taking care" of herself following a difficult year.

The 47-year-old Hollywood actress - who split from husband of 12 years Jim Toth in March - has revealed she threw herself into work to "feel less alone" as she battled personal issues but suffered a crisis and struggled to ask for help.

Speaking at her Hello Sunshine media company's Shine Away event in Los Angeles on Saturday (21.10.23), she explained: "I've been trying really hard to find balance outside of work. I’m a person who fills my schedule with busyness so that I feel less alone or less nervous or less unsettled, like work has always been my bomb. And I started to realise that isn’t going to work for me; about a year ago I was like: ‘I was a robot and the robot broke'. I cried and cried ... It actually makes me feel very vulnerable sharing that with you all. But I think it's important."

She added: "It’s really important to remember that you have to be the glue that holds yourself together. [At the time], I didn’t feel like I was taking very good care of myself and I wasn’t asking other people for help."

However, Reese is convinced reading self-help books when she was in her 20s gave her the tools she needed to get herself together again.

She added: "I feel like I've learned a lot because I did the work – the hard work – in my early 20s, and reading every book and every self-help book and going to therapy and really trying to understand myself and forgive the parts of myself that were broken and the parts of myself where I felt like a failure, because it was a huge part of it ...

Instead of thinking of it as a failure, I think: 'Gosh, I've learned so much from that moment.' And I don't blame others. I just reward myself for the hard things that little Reese went through."