Hayden Panettiere reveals go to tool for battling emotinional toll of roles

Hayden Panettiere, 36, is discussing how she deals with the emotional toll of playing a grieving mom being a mother herself.

In her new psychological thriller, Sleepwalker, Panettiere stars as mourning mom Sarah, who suffers from terrifying sleepwalking visions as she deals with the grief of lsoing her kid.

"The trauma of [losing her daughter] triggers her to start sleepwalking again, which is something she inherited genetically from her mother, and throughout the film, we watch her descend into this incredibly dark place," Panettiere told Us Weekly.

"She starts not being able to tell the difference between when she’s awake and when she’s living in this nightmare world," she added.

As a mom herself to daughter Kaya, 11, the actress was asked how she protects herself from the emotional toll and stays mentally healthy.

"I have to say, it’s a constant battle," she confessed. "Once people figure out that you can be emotional and produce those tears, they love it, and then they’ll write a lot of that in, as you see in things like [my show] Nashville."

"But I’ve found that the more that I have been through in my life, sometimes the harder it is to get there, because once I let those walls down, it can be much harder for me to transition out and shake it off," she continued.

Sharing her go to method for shaking off the characters, Panettiere said, "I really find books helpful for that. They focus me. I’m a big fan of fantasy and science fiction. It’s almost, like, a meditation for me, where my brain gets to focus solely on one thing, creating this world out of words."