AceShowbiz - Reese Witherspoon broke down in tears after realising she felt like a "broken robot" and "wasn't taking care" of herself following a difficult year. The 47-year-old Hollywood actress - who separated from husband of 12 years Jim Toth in March - has revealed she threw herself into work to "feel less alone" as she battled personal issues but suffered a crisis and struggled to ask for help.

"I've been trying really hard to find balance outside of work. I'm a person who fills my schedule with busyness so that I feel less alone or less nervous or less unsettled, like work has always been my bomb," she explained when speaking at her Hello Sunshine media company's Shine Away event in Los Angeles on Saturday, October 21.

"And I started to realise that isn't going to work for me; about a year ago I was like, 'I was a robot and the robot broke.' I cried and cried ... It actually makes me feel very vulnerable sharing that with you all. But I think it's important," she added. "It's really important to remember that you have to be the glue that holds yourself together. [At the time], I didn't feel like I was taking very good care of myself and I wasn't asking other people for help."

However, Reese is convinced reading self-help books when she was in her 20s gave her the tools she needed to get herself together again. She added, "I feel like I've learned a lot because I did the work - the hard work - in my early 20s, and reading every book and every self-help book and going to therapy and really trying to understand myself and forgive the parts of myself that were broken and the parts of myself where I felt like a failure, because it was a huge part of it ..."

"Instead of thinking of it as a failure, I think, 'Gosh, I've learned so much from that moment.' And I don't blame others. I just reward myself for the hard things that little Reese went through."