ACT WELL
PREPARING ACTORS TO PERFORM AT YOUR BEST, SUSTAINABLY
“ANASTASIA’S WORK IS LIFE CHANGING”
- Nicola Larder, Producer and Writer.
Drama school taught you to perform but did they teach you to perform at your best?
Act Well is a unique coaching program designed by an actor for actors, based on neuroscience, somatic psychology and nervous system medicine.
The goal? To help actors thrive despite the uncertainty.
The Truth…
Depression is twice as likely to occur for performers than in the general population.
(Maxwell et al, 2025)
52% of drama students and 60% of professional actors suffer from anxiety, compared to 19.1% of the general population.
(Searl et al, 2019) and (Brodsky, 2001)
1/4 of all actors experience bullying or harassment at work, with women thought to experience higher levels of sexual harassment.
(The University of Sydney, 2022)
Unstable work schedules, long working hours, time away from home and financial fears, matched with chronic exposure to the heavy emotional themes in many of the roles we play… and we have a perfect mental health storm for actors and performers.
And here is why:
It takes a certain kind of person to want to perform for a living…
A person who cares about and notices the predicaments faced by those around them.
Who feels things deeply.
A person who’s dedication to storytelling - reflecting the nature of humanity back to itself so we all get to understand ourselves that little bit better - takes precedent over almost everything else…
It takes a highly sensitive person.
A highly sensitive person who then steps into one of the most competitive and demanding work environments there is.
‘THIS IS REVOLUTIONARY’
- Rose Byrne, Actor
Hi, my name is Anastasia Griffith. I have worked successfully as an actress in Hollywood and the UK for the past 22 years.
After experiencing burnout at the height of my career I went on a journey of profound healing, and intensive training. I now work, simultaneously, as a transformational success coach.
I support other actors and performers to create resilience and good mental health despite the unique challenges we face.
My mission is to prevent others from hitting the burnout and breakdown I did. Instead my clients build longterm wellbeing and sustainable success, personally and professionally, doing the job they set out to love.
My breakdown has become my clients’ breakthrough
“THIS COURSE WAS UNLIKE ANY KIND OF THERAPY I HAVE EVER VENTURED…
WE ALL WANT SOLUTION TO OUR PROBLEMS, WE WANT IMMEDIATE CHANGE, WE WANT PROGRESS… AND IT IS POSSIBLE [with Anastasia].”
- Karima McAdams, Actor
Mental Health Matters…
“The mind is everything. What you think you become”
If we are to maximize our talent, impact and longevity in this business we must prioritise our mental wellbeing and emotional health along the way.
Our mental processes dictate the quality of our lives, relationships, energy levels and physical health.
Our mental health impacts our nervous system, our ability to be creative, perform at our best and therefore our likeliness to succeed.
It is imperative that we actors and performers learn how to maintain good mental and emotional hygiene as a way of life, so that we can:
Sustain self belief and confidence while doing the work we were born to do
Build stamina and longevity, avoiding burn out from long hours and high pressure
Create lasting resilience despite uncertainty and exposure to heightened emotional states in performance
Step into abundance, eliminating scarcity thinking
… So we can live the infinite possibility available to us and enjoy the ride along the way.
The work we do and the environment we do it in is demanding! A lot balances on us being at the ‘top of our game’. We must show up in Truth and integrity while being the leaders our employers need us to be…
But we aren’t taught to develop the capacity we need to meet these expectations. Burn out is rife in our industry, having detrimental affect on our own wellbeing, that of our loved ones, as well as the quality of our work.
There are highly effective, easy to implement solutions. We can learn how to support our own mental, physical and spiritual health to support longterm, sustainable success.
Making sure we have the tools, skills and strategies in place to ‘carry it all’ must not be considered a luxury but part of the job.
I prepare aspiring performers and support seasoned professionals to thrive in this extraordinary business, and beyond.
JOIN ME FOR AN ONLINE PROGRAM THAT WILL CHANGE THE TRAJECTORY OF YOUR CAREER…
The ACT WELL Process…
The ACT WELL program is a self-led online program that guides clients through 6 key concepts, changing their mental and physical strength forever. As such it increases capacity for more creativity,
Created for actors and performers specifically, ACT WELL is designed to build the resilience, confidence and unshakable internal security needed to protect you from the threat of depression, anxiety or burn out in this business.
Using a combination of practical tools, nervous system science, neuro-plasticity and somatic psychotherapy, ACT WELL empowers you to take back control of your own mental, emotional and physical wellbeing so you can:
feel confident that you will perform at your best and actualise the successful career you desire, long term.
The process will address:
MENTAL HEALTH FOR PERFORMANCE WEALTH - Why sustaining good mental health is essential to becoming a success
MANAGING NERVES - Nervous system health for longterm success and physical, mental, emotional wellbeing.
UNCERTAINTY RESILIENCY - making change at the root: cultivating beliefs, thoughts and habits for unshakable resilience and confidence, no matter the circumstances you face.
PROCESSING EMOTIONS - The body and brain cannot distinguish between fact and fiction! Both imagined circumstances and real life experiences must be adequately processed in real time to allow for emotional freedom and good health.
COMMUNICATION, COLLABORATION AND CONSENT - learning how to advocate for yourself in the work place, without getting a ‘rep’.
TAKING YOUR POWER BACK - stepping out of victim and becoming the co-creator of your own existence.
The program is offered as a self-led, online curriculum with additional, optional coaching calls with Anastasia, personally.
This combination of independent study, via workbooks, audios and videos, in-person group coaching and community accountability brings the most tangible, long lasting results.
My Story:
Who am I to teach you this?!
I am you! I have been where you are, and I learned the hard way.. Let me save you the time, money and heartbreak I spent along the way!
Over the stretch of my career, I have enjoyed some meaningful successes and endured many challenging pauses! I have lead big TV shows and ‘supported’ the cast in others. I’ve had posters in Time Square, walked big red carpets and met some incredibly inspiring people along the way. I have been fortunate enough to be in that 1% of ‘successful’ actors.
At the age of 36, after years of high pressure, self-criticism, body image issues and insipid ‘not-enoughness’, I hit burnout, causing a mental and physical breakdown that deconstructed my entire life.
It became apparent that I had been pursuing acting success for all the wrong reasons, leaving me feeling numb and unfulfilled. I had been attempting to use my identity as an actor to heal a significant wound within: a longing for connection, validation, belonging and approval that this business, nor any other, would ever be able to fulfil!
I had created some powerful beliefs about my worth, my value in the world, based on the relationships I had as a child and the dream I had long been reaching for was born out of a desperate need for love and approval and was, in fact, perpetuating the lack of it! Acting had not only stopped being ‘my purpose’ in life, but it was keeping me from it - making me sad, single and unwell.
After long re-evaluation, I took a step back from the career I had worked so hard to achieve and, unbeknownst to me, started the studies that would eventually birth Anastasia Griffith Coaching and the Actualise programme itself.
Over the following year I learned that ‘success' for me, at that stage of my life, had nothing to do with acting at all. I longed to become a mother and re-learn how to truly love, connect with and belong to other beings. Almost miraculously, I called in my beautiful son (a story you can read more about here) and my life took a whole new direction that provided me with a peace and happiness I had never known before.
I made a conscious choice to focus my time and energy on raising my child through those formative first 7 years and created my coaching business, inspired by my personal journey. The Actualise process was born using the tools I had adopted to heal myself and the studies in interpersonal psychology, energy psychology and self development I had long been committed to.
I am delighted to say I have recently come back to my acting career, but with a whole new identity!
I am no longer driven by the need for external validation and approval but by love! Love for my creative expression, love for the stories I tell and love for the people I get to collaborate with,
I now counterbalance the self-focused work of the actor with the ‘in service’ work of the coach and am much more contented in my life - Truly living ‘on purpose’.
“THE WORK ANASTASIA DOES IS MAGICAL
— Sarah Flower, actor
For Production Companies, Studios and Directors…
“there is a mental health crisis in the film and TV sector”.
In 2019 a charity, Looking Glass, conducted a research project into mental health in the film and TV industry. The findings were pretty bleak.
The study discovered, at the heart of the problem, was the ‘3 Cs’:
Poor working CONDITIONS
A CULTURE of bullying and stigma around mental health
A lack of CAPABILITIES in the industry to the mental health of employees.
Two years later, after the pandemic, the situation had worsened considerably with 90% of people working in the film and TV industry experiencing depression (to 65% of the wider population at that time).
There is clearly a responsibility for those above the line to take better care of those below it, in terms of mental health in this business.
But let’s talk productivity and creativity.
You need your performers to show up with these 3 Cs:
Consistency,
Creativity and
Collaboration.
The best way for them to do so, is to have good nervous system health and a resilience practice that can sustain their mental wellbeing through triggering emotional performances, demanding schedules and overexposure. Without it, they get stuck in a chronic fight/flight response cutting them off from the parts of their physiology that allows for these 3 Cs to occur.
Let me help you build the happiest and most productive cast, and set, in the business.
For Drama Schools and Universities…
While it is your job to maximize talent in your performers, it is also to provide a proverbial tool box from which to pull resources and techniques.
PREVENTATIVE mental health practices MUST now be part of that toolbox you offer.
3 qualities you celebrate in your students - presence, playfulness and creativity - can only be accessed with a regulated nervous system. When facing anxiety, self-criticism or internalised stress a survival response is triggered and the imaginative centres of the brain are shut down.
You want good performances? You must teach them to use their physiology to perform at their best.
The lucky students who later find themselves to be working actors will, inevitably, face:
Public scrutiny
Gruelling schedules
Exposure to challenging emotional states
Conflict, and a need to advocate for themselves
Periods of uncertainty and rejection
Those who do not find success must handle the emotional, psychological and financial implications of that.
Part of the job we actors do is to navigate the extraordinary ups and downs this career imposes upon us. To be employable, and not burn out over time, we must develop the skills and practices that will support resilience and self-attunement long term.
Let me help you build the happiest, healthiest and most confident performers ever to be set loose on this business!
“Anastasia has helped me appreciate and value myself more, improve my confidence and breakthrough the negative thought patterns that had become entrenched... stopping the cycle of procrastination. ”
— Charlotte Cavaghan, Writer