Tyler Henry is no stranger to the spotlight. He was just 20 years old when his first show — Hollywood Medium with Tyler Henry — premiered on E!, and since then, he’s written a memoir and performed live shows for thousands across the country. But in his new docuseries, Life After Death with Tyler Henry, Henry reveals the mental, emotional and, yes, even physical toll of being a medium.
After readings, we see Henry bathing and painting to get rid of the lasting anxiety. Before live shows, he’s sometimes unable to even answer the door for room service because he’s so inundated with impressions. And, in one episode, Henry shares that he once suffered a collapsed lung just before a live show, which put him in the hospital for “months.”
“I hope I live a really long lifetime,” he says in Episode 9. “I feel old, though, that’s the thing — like on the inside. And readings make me feel older, and because of that, I can’t envision myself as a 70-year-old because I’m already so tired.”
Life After Death offers an inside look into what it’s like to live everyday life connected to another spiritual plane — the good, the bad and even the somewhat-spooky. But, for his own health, can Henry ever stop receiving messages from beyond? And what kind of effect does that have on a person?
Henry tells Tudum that, though he can never fully turn off the psychic impressions, he’s learned to live with them. “I have to create some degree of compartmentalization, so I don’t take all those feelings and emotions as my own,” he says. “It’s a balancing act.”
Part of that act, he continues, involves turning up and down his abilities when he needs to. Henry describes modulating them as if he were twisting a “volume dial”; scribbling, for example, helps him connect with the afterlife. But sometimes, messages just come through for relative strangers, like in Episode 2 when he receives a message while volunteering at Project Angel Food. When that happens, Henry says he acts like a “mailman,” feeling a sense of duty to deliver the messages.
He’s even spontaneously read loved ones. In Episode 1 of Life After Death, Henry reveals that he once read his mom when he was a teenager. He tells Tudum that he’ll often read Clint Godwin, his boyfriend. One time, Henry told Godwin he needed to contact his family because he was afraid his grandmother was going to fall through a wooden deck. When Godwin called his family, he found out that the accident had “just happened.”
“It’s like Life Alert, but the boyfriend version!” he says.
But Henry’s gift can also cause far more sinister side effects. Though he’s been plagued with health issues since being born three months early, Henry says he knows his ability has “worn him down” over time. In addition to his collapsed lung, Henry says that when he was 18, he had to have emergency surgery due to a brain cyst, which he accurately predicted ahead of time.
So, how does Henry maintain a normal life with all this going on? Basically, keeping rituals helps. No, not altars in dark closets kinds of rituals — anything repetitive, Henry says, helps him decompress. So, for him, that means the steady strokes of painting, for example, or showering every day at the same time.
Being extra cautious helps Henry ease his health-related anxiety. Because he hears about death all day at readings, he’s hyperaware of the accidents that can happen. To avoid them, Henry says he makes sure to get regular checkups and always puts on his seatbelt when getting into a car. “When you’ve seen so much loss and so much death and just the fragility of life,” he says, “there are certain things you do.”
Fellow famous mediums, Henry says, also provide a sense of community. He’s “actually very tight” with psychic medium John Edward, who hosted the sci-fi show Crossing Over with John Edward, and is also in touch with Theresa Caputo, aka the Long Island Medium on TLC. Though everyone works differently, he says support from others like him provides “a sense of being understood.”
Even doing readings, Henry says, helps ease the burden of being a medium. If he doesn’t do any readings for about three weeks, he’ll start going “stir-crazy” and will need to blow off the “psychic steam” that builds up. Otherwise, Henry will begin to receive psychic images while he’s falling asleep and get visits from spirits in his dreams.
“Being able to have a time and place to do readings has allowed me to have some sense of normalcy so that when I’m not doing readings, I can maintain some kind of a normal life,” he says.
And, despite all the side effects, Henry says he wouldn’t give up readings even if he could, saying it’s his “point” as an intermediary between life and death. “I think the price I pay for readings is also why they’re really accurate,” he says. “The intensity of the information coming through is a testament to their validity.”
