Shailene Woodley Was So Bummed After Breaking Up With Aaron Rodgers That “Shoveling Horse Shit” Cheered Her Up

The DSM-5 lists sudden weight change, feelings of worthlessness or guilt, sleep disturbances, and a loss of interest or pleasure among the criteria for diagnosing clinical depression. For Shailene Woodley, all it takes to tell is one look at a tree.

“I knew I was depressed when I looked at a tree and felt nothing,” she said in an interview with Outside magazine published Tuesday in honor of the publication selecting her as their Outsider of the Year. “That was the lowest low of my life.”

The actor was seemingly referring to the aftermath of her 2022 breakup with fiancé Aaron Rodgers, unless some other thing happened that would make her tell the magazine that her low came after she had “a really awful, traumatic thing happen in early 2022.”

“I felt like I lost my soul, my self, my happiness, my joy,” she said of the incident. “I really understood depression and anxiety and, like, complete soul detachment.”

She also, apparently, lost some of her camping equipment in the split: “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 that shoot, Woodley’s friend Kris Zero, is also the person Woodley credits with pulling her out of the dumps, occasionally by dealing with…literal dumps.

“Sometimes I was so angry at her,” Woodley said of Zero, who she said woke her up by blasting music pretty much every day for six months after the split. “But then we’d go surf, and for ten minutes that day I thought life could be OK again. Then the depression would come back and she’d go, ‘We’re volunteering at the horse ranch!’ And we’d find a random fucking horse ranch, and we’d clean up horse shit. We’d clean hooves and brush the horses, and for 20 minutes that day I thought life could be OK again. And then the depression came back and she’d wake me up the next morning and go, ‘Let’s go on a hike and bring trash bags and clean up trash!’”

Of course, it takes more than just one woman and manual labor involving equine dookie to lift a depression—Woodley also had Three Women, the Showtime series she co-starred in alongside Betty Gilpin, DeWanda Wise, and Gabrielle Creevey and which aired earlier this year. In January 2023, Woodley told Net-A-Porter that she released some of her feelings around her heartbreak on set.

“Three Women feels like it matters a lot—mostly, I think, because it mattered so much to me,” she said. “I feel honored to be a part of it, because it genuinely gave me a North Star in a time in my life when my compass…calibration did not exist.”

“It was hard to film because I was going through the darkest, hardest time in my life; it was winter in New York, and my personal life was shit, so it felt like a big pain bubble for eight months,” she said. “I was so grateful that at least I could go to work and cry and process my emotions through my character.”

At the time of the split, a source close to Rodgers called it an amicable one, saying, “They will remain friendly; there’s no bad blood and no drama. It just didn’t work out for them.” Now, however, the party line seems to have shifted, to say the least. As Woodley told Outside, she was in a “toxic situation.” She did name Rodgers specifically once in the interview, too, apparently tearing up: “I haven’t shared much about my relationship with Aaron because it always makes me cry,” she said. “It was not right. But it was beautiful.”

Rodgers credited something other than shoveling horse poop and filming TV adaptations about the lives of sex researchers with improving his own mental health around the same time: Ayahuasca, baby.

In August 2022, Rodgers—currently making headlines for admitting that he was sad that people were mad that he refused to be vaccinated for COVID and kept doing football heavy breathing anyway, and who was reportedly a potential VP pick for fellow health ick RFK Jr.‘s failed presidential campaign—appeared on the Aubrey Marcus Podcast and credited experiences with the psychedelic drug with helping him learn to love himself and also get really, really good at football.

“To me, one of the core tenets of your mental health is that self-love,” he said. “That’s what ayahuasca did for me, was help me see how to unconditionally love myself.”

And that he got back-to-back MVP titles in the NFL around the same time?

“I don’t really believe in coincidences at this point,” Rodgers said. “It’s the universe bringing things to happen when they’re supposed to happen.”

Representatives for Woodley declined to comment for this story.