Liza Koshy Swears By 3-Mile Runs To Manage Her Social Anxiety
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Within moments of sitting down, Liza Koshy charmed our server.
“Where are you from?” she asked. “Have you seen Succession?” The server squatted down next to our table and chatted for about 15 minutes, then, over the next few hours, checked in on us just a little more frequently than usual, asking if we wanted anything else and if our coffee was okay.
It’s possible she was one of Liza’s countless fans—one of the 7 million who followed her on Vine before the app closed in 2017, or one of the 17.5 million who subscribe to her YouTube channel, where she created three seasons of the scripted sitcom Liza on Demand. Maybe our server saw Liza during her Emmy-nominated stint as the host of Nickelodeon’s Double Dare, or watched her Netflix dance comedy Work It. But there’s also a chance she didn’t recognize Liza behind her mask at all. Liza is just impossibly charming.
Bubbly and polite, self-effacing and then, unexpectedly, outrageously funny in a laugh-from-your-belly, snort-coffee-out-your-nose kind of way. She greeted me at Laurel Hardware, an industrial-chic restaurant and bar in West Hollywood, with a hug and a reminder that we needed to take a photo for a mutual friend. She spoke to me—and to our server—as if we were old friends she’d known forever.
“It’s overcompensating at its finest,” Liza said of the seeming ease with which she navigates meeting new people. She’s an introvert who has mastered the art of pretending to be an extrovert. “It works for me. It created a career.” Coming up with different characters always came naturally to Liza, 25, who began posting videos as various personas in 2013, when she was just 17 years old. “It was entirely innate to me to take the voices in my head and dress them up, give them a wig, give them an outfit. It’s something I’d been doing on my own for a long time before stepping onto a professional set.”
During her Vine phase, Liza honed her ability to get to a punch line fast. “It was quick-witted humor that carried over in a matter of seconds.” That same style of comedy served her well on YouTube, where audiences responded to fast-paced editing and joke-a-second pacing.
Recently, Liza has successfully learned to adapt her larger-than-life charisma to the more grounded arena of film. This year, she costars in two movies: Cat Person, based on the viral New Yorker short story by Kristen Roupenian, and Players, a romantic comedy for Netflix featuring Gina Rodriguez and Damon Wayans, Jr.
But being on the brink of superstardom means learning to navigate not just Hollywood, but also her mental health. That lifelong habit of “overcompensating”? It takes its toll. Liza has dealt with serious social anxiety—and started opening up about it two and a half years ago, becoming an advocate for people who also might shine in social situations but silently struggle beneath the surface.
One of her best strategies for quieting the voices in her head is running. “It’s a meditation for me,” she says. “Running to the beat and just being out of my head and in the world, and doing one thing over and over and over again…I’m totally present in my body.”
As a child, Liza was a dancer, but by her freshman year of college, she needed to find a new way to move in order to manage her stress and anxiety. That’s when she found running. Now, Liza runs three miles every other day. And her secret motivational weapon is, perhaps surprisingly, Pentatonix Christmas carols. “My own internal, like, revenge at the world for giving you shit for listening to Christmas music [when it’s not Christmas].” Those festive songs? They get her going. “One hundred seventy-five to 195 beats per minute. Pentatonix Christmas carols. And I’m just going so f*cking hard.”
When she’s not pounding the pavement, Liza is hitting the weights, working with friend and trainer Jenna Willis either in person or via virtual classes, as she did early on in the pandemic when she was quarantining with her family in Texas. While other people were building up their home gyms with black market weights, Liza worked out with simple soup cans. (“I was like, ‘I refuse to buy weights’ because I kept thinking [the pandemic] was ending.”)
“[Lifting weights] has made me stronger and a faster runner, a better dancer,” Liza says. “I could not have done the things I did for Work It rehearsal-wise, or even just acting-wise, without having that confidence and strength in my own body to be able to perform.”
Thanks to her yoga-instructor mother, Liza also counts occasional relaxation sessions as part of her feel-good routine. “This is going to make me sound way cooler than I am, but yoga nidra is a really dope practice,” she says. “It brings you through your body during a meditation, and as a physical person, it’s a really fun practice to tap your fingers and feel, like, the muscle or the tissue around your kneecap. It goes into detail on where you should be in your body and it pulls you entirely out of your head. If you do breath work, your body tingles. It’s foo-foo as hell—it’s very L.A.—but it’s also just very spiritual.”
Her yoga prowess is also key for a quick energy boost: “I like to stand on my head every now and then; I find the blood rush is equivalent to a cup of coffee for me. Also, putting my legs up against a wall for 10 minutes is equal to a 40-minute nap.”
Liza tries to keep herself performance-ready by eating vegan as often as she can. “I try for four times a week.”
Most mornings, though, Liza makes herself—as she calls it—a “weird-ass omelet.” “Once I fall in love with the recipe, I make it over and over and over again,” she says. The recipe: She mixes a banana, an egg, and protein powder and cooks it all together in a pan. Then she covers it with melted chocolate and peanut butter and, for good measure, sprinkles the whole thing with Magic Spoon cereal. “I put it on top of my protein pancake situation and it’s just delicious,” she says. “It’s like eating a giant piece of chocolate cake in the morning.”
For lunch and dinner, it’s usually a salad with protein. Liza is also a devotee of the air fryer. “I’m obsessed with the air fryer,” she says. “French fries in the air fryer are fantastic. You can make salmon, you can make a rotisserie chicken if you get a fryer big enough. You can make a whole Thanksgiving turkey in it—it’s possible.”
I ask her what the difference is between an air fryer and an oven. “First of all, the air fryer is hideous. An oven is naturally placed in the kitchen, whereas an air fryer is an eyesore that no one wants, but should have. It just pumps the breath of God through your food, it air-fries without any oil. You don’t need any oil!” Her enthusiasm is absolutely palpable. I added an air fryer to my wedding registry as soon as I got home.
What else makes Liza this happy? Chocolate—especially the caffeinated Awake chocolate. The movie Bruce Almighty. Comfort-food TV, like Broad City, Gilmore Girls, and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Television shows featuring smart women firing witty one-liners and building communities around themselves. Fleabag and its creator-star Phoebe Waller-Bridge is one of Liza’s biggest inspirations. She even named her dog Phoebe Waller-Bitch. (“I was so happy when Phoebe Waller-Bitch got fleas,” she deadpans.)
Like (the human) Waller-Bridge, Liza hopes to be able to jump between projects—eventually, to navigate directing as well. But in the meantime, she’s enjoying the ride. Even though she’s already made Forbes’s 30 Under 30, Liza says, “I don’t think there’s ever been a moment where I’m like, ‘I’ve made it.’ I don’t think there ever will be. No.” She shakes her head, then smiles. “I think it’s like, ‘I’m making it.’”
It’s all part of the process, the journey, for Liza. It’s learning how to manage her social anxiety and becoming a massive rising star at the same time. It’s running and strength training and blasting brussels sprouts in the air fryer until they’re black and crispy. It’s pretending to be extroverted long enough that she became famous for it, but also now being able to talk about what’s going on beneath the surface. Liza might feel like she’s still “making it,” but she’s sure found a way to make it all work.
Photographed by Aingeru Zorita. Fashion director: Kristen Saladino. Hair and styling:
Graham Nation at The Wall Group using Unite Hair and GHD. Makeup: Dominique Della for The Only Agency. Manicure: Zola Ganzorigt at The Wall Group using OPI.
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