Jodie Sweetin took drugs as a teenager so her classmates didn't think she was "stuck up".

The 44-year-old actress - who has spoken in the past about her struggles with addiction - worried about what people would think of her once her time as Stephanie Tanner on Full House came to an end in 1995 so she was determined to act "worse" than other young people to stop her high school peers from turning on her.

Speaking to Michael Rosenbaum on his Inside of You podcast, she said: "I had this weird, I'll say, I had this, particularly after the show ended, like, in high school, there was this strange feeling that I had, because everyone assumed I was quote unquote a TV star. So, like, you know, the rumor before you would even start at a school was like, 'Oh, she's a stuck-up b****.'

"I wanted to prove them wrong. So it was like, in order to make myself palatable and make other people feel like I wasn't trying to be better than them, I would try to be worse than them. So like, 'I don't think I'm better than you. I'll get more f***** up. I'll do more drugs.' "

Jodie, who joined Full House when she was just five years old, admitted she spent years struggling with her identity and questioning if people only liked her because of her fame.

She said:"You keep going, and then that becomes who you are, you know. I spent most of my life through my, probably, mid-30s being like, 'Do you love me? Do you love me?'...

"I had no idea [who I was]. I had to make a mess of relationships, I had to cheat, I had to lie.

"I had to get involved with really severely toxic, scary people, but I had to get through all that...

" It really has, sort of, rocketed me all of that into this place where around my mid-30s, I was just like, 'Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I think I've been doing this all wrong.'"

After getting sober, Jodie - who is married to Mescal Wasilewski and has two kids from her previous marriages - entered therapy and "dug in" to uncover the moments from her past that had shaped her life and soon realised she had hardly ever made her own decisions.

She said: "I went through it, but I had to be like, 'What did I choose? What did I bring to this and why?'

"I realised I just, sort of, let everyone else make choices for me, and I never really even asked myself, 'What do you want?' "

"I'm glad that I was able to look at it, reflect on it and really dig into it and be willing to be like, 'All right, back to therapy we go.'

"Then you're like, 'Oh, wait. This actually turns out this actually feels way better, like, I actually don't hate myself and I don't feel like I'm trying to be anybody other than me.' "