Emily Blunt opens up about ‘emotionally exhausting’ health condition

"It's really frustrating, and there's a helplessness that people can feel."

The Devil Wears Prada star opened up about her condition when she was a guest on NBC's Today Show.

The mum-of-two revealed her lifelong condition began in childhood and said it can be “emotionally exhausting” in daily life.

Blunt went on to say that she suffers from stuttering and joined Heather Grossman, executive director of the American Institute for Stuttering, on NBC's Today to share her lifelong journey with the condition.

Emily revealed the environments that still give her trouble with speaking fluency, such as when she says her own name.

The Hollywood star said it was both 'frustrating' and 'emotionally exhausting'.

She said: "You feel like there’s this sort of imposter in your body that misrepresents who you really are. It was something I struggled with severely when I was a child.

"It's still something that I contend with under certain environments, moments of stress, fatigue, pressure, and it's neurological, it's biological. It's often hereditary. It runs very prominently in my family, so my uncle, my cousin, my grandfather, and as a child, you know, you don't understand why you can't speak.

"You know exactly what you want to say. You would love to read your poem out in class, but you just find ways to avoid speaking. And that kind of disfluency is usually really misunderstood by people and misidentified as other things.

"It's still something that I contend with. I contend with it when I say my own name, because you can't substitute your name for other words.

"You'll find stutterers will often go through this elaborate mental and verbal gymnastics of constantly substituting other words. If you feel one coming up that's gonna knock you."

The actor opened up that she still struggles saying her own name nowadays: "I struggle if I'm calling someone and I have to say my name on the phone, and that worries me still, I just panic.

"It can take me a while to say my name, because you can't substitute your name. It is still the universal thing that all stutterers deal with, which is that they struggle with their own name.

"And I think if I'm really tired or if I'm feeling stressed, like leading up to a movie. I think it's emotionally exhausting. I think that we all want to show who we are, and I think that's the entrapment of it, that you feel like there's this sort of imposter in your body that misrepresents who you really are.

"It's really frustrating, and there's a helplessness that people can feel and a loneliness, and people just avoid, and they start shutting down, and they just don't speak," she added.