Emma Watson believes giving up acting has made her relationships with other people "better"

She told Hollywood Authentic: "I am maybe the happiest and healthiest I've ever been. I think what's interesting about being an actor is, there's a tendency to sort of fracture yourself into multiple personalities.

"I'm not just talking about the roles you play, but having the weight of a public persona, that sort of needs constant feeding and sprucing and glamorising. It's very energy-intensive stuff.

"And shedding the multiple identities has freed up so much space, I think, for me to be a better sister, daughter, friend, granddaughter, and then artist. And someone who's trying to do some critical thinking of her own."

The Perks of Being a Wallflower star admitted she had pushed herself in her work for so long that her life "bottomed out" and she knew she needed to do some "construction work" to find meaning beyong her career.

She said: "The most important thing, really - or the foundation of your life - is your home and friends and family. I think I worked so hard for so long that my life sort of bottomed out. The bottom fell out of the piece, which was actually me and my life.

"So I needed to go and do some construction work. Some good foundations for anything else to grow from.

"Because if you don't have that, there's a kind of mania that ensues; a kind of panic where you move from one project to the next, kind of terrified of the void in between them. You realise you don't have a rhythm to your life."

However, even though she knew she was making the right decision, Emma was still "really afraid" to walk away.

She added: "I read this thing recently: each day, our daily lives have to have satisfaction and completion and meaning, in and of themselves. I needed to go and rebuild that. And I'm very happy and proud I did. Because walking away from things is much harder than walking towards things.

"Leaving things, and not knowing, is much harder, I think, than having a goal, and being able to tell everyone exactly what you're up to.

"So it felt very courageous at the time. And, if I'm being honest, I was mostly just really afraid and quite scared.

"But I'm very pleased that it was the right thing. Sometimes the hard thing is the right thing, not the easy thing."