
Paul Wesley reflects on neglecting health during ‘The Vampire Diaries’

Paul Wesley now focusing on his health and making it a priority after putting it last during his 20s.
Paul opened up about being “overworked and stressed” in his 20s and 30s and how he had to pay with his health for having worked that much.
The Vampire Diaries star told People that he took is role as Stefan Salvatore in the show very seriously and neglected his health, thinking, “I’m lucky, I have good genetics. I don’t need to worry about anything,” about his health.
“As I got older, I was really inundated with work and filming, crazy hours, and stress,” Wesley shared. “I started to really notice changes in my sleep pattern and just overall health.”
In the past years, the actor struggles with “extremely low energy levels, brain fog, and unpredictable sleep patterns.”
“I was like, ‘Okay, why is this happening? I’m a healthy guy. What’s going on?’ And that’s when I became interested in it,” he said of holistic health practices. “I realized that you can have certain protocols — like supplements, dieting and exercising, and even meditation — that can prevent so many things.”
“For the last, maybe five or six years, I’ve been much more focused on trying to approach things from a holistic perspective… Traditionally, especially in America, we get sick, we go to the doctor, we take medicine and we continue doing what we’re doing. We never really look under the hood to see what’s going on,” he explained.
In order to fully understand what his body needed, he worked with the clinic to create a specialized plan using a blood test to find out which supplements he should take.
“On top of that, we used to think of exercise as something you do just because you want to look good,” he added. “And obviously, that’s a component, but it’s also something that we need to do for longevity, for mental health — every aspect.”
“Meditation is something that really changed my life in my early-30s. I was like, ‘Whoa’ — I couldn’t believe that I was missing out on it,” Paul Wesley further shared.