AJ Lee on Her Mental Health & CM Punk’s Support, WWE’s Evolved Approach to Mental Health For Their Performers, Her Fears Before Her Wrestling Return in 2025, & Confirms She Will Appear on Next Season of WWE Unreal

A recent episode of the State of Mind with Maurice Benard podcast featured AJ Lee as the guest. One of the topics discussed included Lee’s thoughts about her managing her bipolar disorder during difficult periods and her husband and WWE talent CM Punk understanding her needs during her low days.

“I named it like my dark days. I’ll wake up and I know it’s a low cycle and I’ll tell my husband and I warn him and he’s very open to it and knows the language of it now where he’s just like ‘Okay what do you need like how do we make this day better?’ Like a stasis that is peace and that is so that can be so rare. So much you’re sort of riding that wave and trying to not go up too much or down.

Right. Yeah. And that can make every symptom worse sometimes. So, like if it’s, I’m really stressed or if there’s like a lot of negativity or a lot of eyeballs on me or judgment and then if you get physically hurt, like constant pain can really trigger my depressive cycles as well. So, it’s such a tricky thing to balance. And I did kind of have to dip my toe in and be like ‘Okay, I’m going to have the schedule that works for me where I can still make sure I’m sleeping right. I still have the time to take my medication and go to therapy and have my routine because that’s what keeps me alive and perform’. And so that was like a balancing act.” 

Lee also gave her thoughts about how stress, negativity, public scrutiny, and physical injuries can worsen her symptoms and why it crucial to maintain a rigid routine for herself. Lee also gave her thoughts about how WWE’s approach to mental health for performers has evolved over the years and it being a key point in her conversations with WWE President Nick Khan and WWE CCO Paul “Triple H” Levesque for her return to the company.

“I’ve had suggested surgeries, but I haven’t done them for my neck. And I’ve strained stuff and torn some minor tears here and there, but a lot of the culture when I was younger was you just keep going because it’s going to keep going without you. So if you’re injured, you just kind of fake it and say you’re fine and keep going injured.

It’s very much not that now, which I was really happy to see. It’s very much like ‘Let’s have a conversation about how you’re feeling and you can get time off and you can spend more time with your family.’ And I will say to their credit, my biggest concern coming back was my mental health. And Nick Khan and Paul Levesque, they’re like the bosses that kind of brought me in. They were so open about ‘We will protect our mental health and if we don’t we’re not doing our job right, like that’s going to be our number one priority.’

And it was never like that 10 years ago. I felt like I had to hide that part of me 10 years ago. So for my bosses to support me in that way I have to give them all the credit for that.”

Lee also gave her thoughts about the fears she had before she made her return to WWE and wrestling in 2025.

“A big fear was coming back to the spotlight and like wrestling again. My last year wrestling, I think we talked about this on the last podcast, there was so much happening in my life. You have all these eyeballs on you. It’s really high-stakes and high-pressure performance. My brain was at my lowest when it seemed like I was on the top of the world, I was a champion, and all this stuff.

So, taking 10 years, really taking care of myself and feeling the healthiest I’ve ever felt, then being like, ‘Okay, now go back into wrestling.’ I was really scared, like, ‘What’s that pressure going to do?’ But I felt so proud of myself for like, ‘Oh, I have the tools now.’ If I can wake up anxious, or I can be anxious behind the scenes and about to go out through the curtain. But I know how to work with it. So that was like the test was this year.”

Lee also revealed that her return to WWE will be covered in the next upcoming season of the WWE: Unreal docuseries on Netflix.

“Now I’m trying to, the balancing act of trying to fit two careers into one life has been interesting. I spent the last 10 months, eight months on Raw on Netflix. I’m going to be doing Unreal, the documentary series for WWE, also on and then I’m still writing and producing. I have a production company called Scrappy Heart Productions and our goal is to just make underdogs the stars of their own stories. And we’re right now producing our first feature film and the short film version of it went to Tribeca last year and did a film festival circuit and did it really well. So we’re making the feature length version of that and we have a bunch of other projects in the works that we love and we’re so passionate about including comic books.

We’re about to announce a new one soon. Maybe in a couple months we can say what that’s about. But we’re working hard on that one. So, I just to me it’s all different parts of the same muscle. It’s all storytelling and creating.” 

Transcript h/t: F4WOnline.com 1 & 2, Fightful.com