The actor also clarified that he wasn't high when he recently shaved his head.
Dax Shepard is thanking his fans for their support following the candid and emotional episode of his podcast, Armchair Expert, on Friday, where he talked about his recent relapse and addiction to prescription pain pills.
On Monday's episode of Armchair Expert, which featured a conversation with director Sofia Coppola, Shepard addressed the outpouring of support he's received. The podcast episode on Friday was titled "Day 7," the amount of days he had been sober.
"Just quickly, I want to say thanks to all the people that have been so unbelievably lovely to us in response to 'Day 7,'" Shepard said.
The father of two said that he actually got the opposite response he was expecting.
"My fears were the opposite of what the result was, yeah," he said. "But yeah, struggling with some fraudulent feelings of receiving love based on a f**kup. But, at any rate, I am really, really grateful, and, there's so many beautiful, nice people."
Shepard later laughed at those who mused that he shaved his head earlier this month because he was on drugs.
"A lot of people said, 'I could see you were high as a kite,'" he said. "I actually was not. I was having a metamorphosis, transitional ... I wanted to make a physical statement that I was shedding something."
During the "Day 7" podcast, Shepard shared that about two weeks ago, he came clean to his wife, Kristen Bell, as well as his podcast co-host, Monica Padman, about taking an increasing amount of prescription pain pills and lying about it. While Shepard had been taking pain pills because of injuries related to his love for riding motorcycles, he acknowledged that about six months ago, his behavior started getting "shadier and shadier" and he began to increase the amount. It eventually progressed to the point where he started buying pain pills.
"For the last eight weeks maybe, I don't really know ... I'm on them all day," he said. "And I'm allowed to be on them at some dosage because I have a prescription. And then I'm also augmenting that. And then all the prescriptions run out, and I'm now just taking 30 mil Oxys that I've bought at whenever I decide I can do."
Shepard said he still had not drunk alcohol or used cocaine in 16 years, which is why it was painful for him to acknowledge his relapse. Eventually, he decided to come clean to everybody after a close friend said he needed to get rid of his ego and arrogance.
"For a long time, I've known intellectually that things are going to get worse," he said of his addiction. "That each encounter with it had gotten more shady and more dangerous and I recognize that the next go-around would be, 'Oh, I can't get pills. Let's snort heroin.' And, you know, I've had a lot of friends that I've watched go through this whole cycle, and I finally have the humility to say, 'I will not be any different. I won't be special. I won't be smarter. I will be exactly like everyone else.'"
Meanwhile, Shepard and Bell have always been open about his ongoing struggles with addiction. Bell previously discussed her husband's sobriety with ET in 2018 while promoting her film, Like Father.
"I mean, I married an addict who almost has 14 years [sober] and it's a daily struggle and it will always be a daily struggle," she said at the time. "My mother-in-law also said to me whatever choices you made yesterday were those choices and today’s a new day and they’re all new choices and you can choose again."
For more, watch the video below.
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