The Olympic gymnast — who welcomed her third child, son Bear, earlier this month — detailed her previous addiction to Adderall, sharing that she “never want[s] to feel out of control like that again.”
Shawn Johnson is opening up about her decision to turn down pain medications after the birth of her third child.
While participating in a Q&A with her followers on her Instagram Stories Friday, the Olympic gymnast — who gave birth to son Barrett “Bear” on December 12 via C-section — revealed she refused painkillers to help with the recovery from her Caesarean delivery due to a past addiction to Adderall.
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In one slide, Johnson, 31, responded to a fan who asked how Bear’s birth “compared” to the birth of her first two children: daughter Drew, 4, and son Jett, 2.
“Third c-section was definitely the hardest but smoothest (if that’s possible HA),” she wrote. “Had so much scar tissue that they cut out and cleaned up so I was SUPER sore and swollen.”
“Feeling great now though,” Johnson added. “I also refuse all pain meds haha (they make me SO sick and frankly after being addicted to adderall it just scares me so I don’t even mes [sic] with it).”
The Olympic gold medalist went on to share more details about her “adderall history” and her decision to turn down “narcotic pain meds” for her C-section.
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“Ok … long story short during my comeback in 2010 I was prescribed adderall to ‘curl my appetite and give me more energy’ but not a good doctor,” Johnson wrote alongside a photo of herself holding her newborn in a hospital bed.
“Fast forward 7 years of being heavily addicted to it and having it control me, when I finally freed myself of it I swore anything remotely addictive I’d stay away from,” she continued. “It affected every part of my life and changed who I was.”
“I never want to feel out of control like that again,” Johnson concluded. “So …. Tylenol and Motrin for me :)”
Back in 2020, Johnson shared a video on her YouTube channel, in which she detailed her struggles with an eating disorder, pills, and a miscarriage after her professional gymnastics career came to a halt.
After she gained 15 pounds following the Olympics, the mom of three said she “started doing anything and everything I possibly could to lose the weight and to look like I did” during the Olympic training, turning to ephedrine, Adderall, and various weight loss pills to help attain that Olympic image.
“I started doing any and everything I possibly could to lose the weight and to look like I did at the Olympics,” Johnson said. “Because in my mind, everybody praised me for what I did at the Olympics, they praised who I was as a human being when I was there. And in my mind if I could look like that — not necessarily compete or do gymnastics — but if I could be that person again, then the world would say that I was ‘enough’ and I was accepted.”
“I went through this dark kind of spiral of a few years on terrible medications and drugs that tried to spike my metabolism and did nothing,” she confessed, later adding that she started taking “heavy doses” of Adderall again when she attempted to make the Olympic team in 2012.
“I continued to compete into 2012, where I just started to get depressed, I think as a consequence and a side effect of Adderall,” Johnson continued, sharing that was believed she was “overdosing” on the drug, which is prescribed for ADHD.
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She married Andrew East in 2016, and they got pregnant a year later, but she suffered a miscarriage.
Acknowledging it as her “low point,” Johnson worried her “bad decisions” during her Olympic training would make it impossible to have children.
However, a doctor told her otherwise and, the couple welcomed daughter, Drew, in 2019.
“There was something that switched when I got pregnant, where it was no longer about me or my body or like the vanity or like the calories or what I looked like or what I weighed,” she confessed. “I could have cared less. It was about protecting my baby. And I was so excited by that.”
