Shailene Woodley recognized—then healed—her heartache through nature.

“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.”

“I felt like I lost my soul, my self, my happiness, my joy,” she said, seemingly referring to the aftermath of her 2022 breakup with fiancé Aaron Rodgers. “I really understood depression and anxiety and, like, complete soul detachment.”

She also 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 Outside's shoot, Woodley’s friend Kris Zero, is also the person Woodley credits with pulling her out of the dumps, even when that meant doing decidedly unglamorous grunt work.

“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 to lift a depression—Woodley also had her work, including Three Women, the Showtime-turned-Starz 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 named Rodgers only once in the interview: “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.”

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 who was reportedly a potential VP pick for RFK Jr.'s failed presidential campaign—appeared on the Aubrey Marcus Podcast and credited ayahuasca with helping him through the rough patch.

“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.”

Representatives for Woodley declined to comment for this story.