On a Sunday in February 2023, everything changed dramatically for actress Hayden Panettiere: her younger brother and fellow actor, Jansen Panettiere, was found dead in his New York apartment. He was only 28.

The family would later reveal that he had died of cardiomegaly (an enlarged heart) combined with aortic valve complications.

Now, the ‘Bring It On: All or Nothing’ actress is speaking candidly for the first time about the loss of Jansen. She tells how his death affected her not only mentally, but also physically.

HAYDEN PANETTIERE AND FAMILY SHARE CAUSE OF JANSEN’S DEATH AT 28: ‘UNTHINKABLE LOSS’

“He was my only brother, and he was my little brother, and it was my job to protect him,” Panettiere told People magazine for their new cover story. “When I lost him, it felt like I lost half my soul.”

“I remember saying to someone — it wasn’t even a year ago — and I thought, ‘Don’t ever, ever expect to get over losing him.’ Because no matter how many years go by, he’ll always be there by my side.

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“I will always be sad about it. I will never be able to get over it,” said Panettiere, now 35.

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“Time heals things, but time can also make you think differently, ask different questions, imagine different things, and realize things you wish you never had known,” she explains.

“Just recently, when I saw people make a big deal out of little things, and you know, God bless them for wanting it to be perfect, but when something so big happens to you, you really learn to pick your battles and not let the little things get you down. Because once something so, so terrible, so, so deep, so, I mean catastrophic happens in your life, there’s not much that can really affect you.”

She was certainly shocked by the loss of Jansen; Panettiere says her grief far exceeded anything emotional.

“When my brother passed away, my body did something I’d never seen before, which was within a couple of days, I just bloated up. Bloated,” the actress said of her unexpected weight gain. “Stress and cortisol raging through your body can do that. I tried everything — everything unhealthy, everything healthy — it didn’t matter what I ate, it didn’t matter what I did. My body… it was like protecting itself, shielding itself from the world.”

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“I saw these horrible paparazzi photos of me coming out of his funeral, which was in a very private place where we grew up, so it was shocking,” she said. “I didn’t even recognize myself… It also brought out the agoraphobia in me. Something I haven’t always struggled with.”

According to the Mayo Clinic, agoraphobia is an anxiety disorder in which people fear places or situations that may trigger panic and create feelings of captivity, helplessness, or shame.

“I was living in sweatpants and T-shirts and things that were just kind of weighing me down and not flattering me. It took me so long to figure out an outfit that I felt comfortable enough in to even leave the house and hang out with my friends,” she recalls. “And so it became this really bad, destructive hamster wheel of, ‘Do I feel good enough to go out? I don’t feel confident enough, but if I don’t go out and if I don’t keep moving… I’m never going to look like this again.'”

“I got desperate. Because I wanted to keep working, but I didn’t want to be miserable on set. And I didn’t want to go into the dressing room and look at myself in the mirror and hate everything I saw about myself,” she said.

Thanks to the help of her publicist, who put her in touch with a personal trainer, Panettiere was able to turn things around.

“My body just started responding, not just from the exercise. It let me let go of the stress, the high expectations that I had always placed on myself,” she said, which helped her confront her agoraphobia. “There’s nothing like looking in the mirror and feeling like you look good enough to walk out the door.”

Source original article: Hayden Panettiere developed agoraphobia and gained weight rapidly after his brother’s sudden death