Being successful, wealthy, pretty, and internationally admired doesn’t solve everything, you know. Every once in a while, Gwyneth Paltrow gets overwhelmed by the richness of her own life. “I think what stresses me out the most is trying to do so many things at once all the time, trying to be a good, present mother, trying to act, to cook,” Paltrow told us at the Bent on Learning gala last night. “I do a lot at once, and I think that sometimes the idea of trying to do all of that stresses me out a lot,” she says. Also, there’s traffic. “Traffic really fucking stresses me out,” Paltrow adds.
Yoga, of course, is Gwyneth’s antidote for stress, and her favorite pose is the Baddha Konasana. “It’s the most painful, but then it gets me the furthest,” she explains.
On branding herself as a lifestyle guru, as Bob Morris contended in the New York Times on Sunday, Paltrow is blasé. “It’s so weird,” she says. “I’m just sending out, like, a letter once a week because my friends kind of asked me to, and then I thought, well, I should include other women if they have interest and, you know, I’m not selling anything, I’m not advertising anything, so I find the interest in it kind of incredible in a way, because I’ve never promoted it.” The actress says that her newsletter has well over 150,000 subscribers. “Listen, I have a really blessed, weird, interesting life, and, you know, if my observations or the people that I get to meet are helping my friends, who are calling and saying I want to do this, or I want to go here, or what should I do, then I thought, well, it might be nice to share it with other people.”
She says she’s not considering a magazine, à la Martha or Oprah, or even whether to turn it into a business of any kind. “It’s at the beginning and it’s more people saying is this a business? You know, I haven’t even gotten that far, mentally, at all. I just really enjoy doing it,” Paltrow says. “I enjoy the cooking part of it, and I’m doing a book, which is the sort of only business venture. But it’s not really why I started the website.”
