"I had a bit of PTSD." Pia Miranda on what life was like after Survivor Australia.

Pia Miranda was crowned Sole Survivor on Tuesday night, after a gruelling 50 days of… torture.

“I just paid off my mortgage in seven traumatising weeks,” the Australian actress exclaimed after receiving a cheque for $500,000.

She won in a landslide, too, with not one person from the tribal council voting for the other final two contender, Baden Gilbert.

But upon returning to her normal life, Miranda has since admitted that it wasn’t easy to relax into her pre-Survivor routine.

Talking to Now To Love, the Looking For Alibrandi actress shared: “I honestly felt like I had a bit of PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder].”

“It took me a long time to relax – I thought everyone was plotting against me!

“I told myself, ‘My family isn’t plotting against me,’ but some days I’d struggle to look them in the eye. I kept saying, ‘I have to keep an eye on everyone.’ But I was just being paranoid.”

 

View this post on Instagram

 

If you were Baden, would you take Harry or Pia to the end with you? #SurvivorAU

A post shared by Australian Survivor (@survivorau) on Sep 17, 2019 at 3:15am PDT

Speaking to Mamamia before Survivor went to air, the Australian actress talked about how hard it was to be away from her family.

“The emotional stuff for me was more challenging,” she admits. “Not so much the lying and the cheating, but just missing my family was really, really tough.

“You have no contact, you have no information about what’s going on at home. So sometimes you think the worse and that’s really hard to mentally get through.”

Listen to Survivor star Luke Toki share what his family went through while he filmed the show, his thoughts on Pia Miranda and the scandalous scenes that never made it to air.

When people ask her what exactly being a contestant on the Channel 10 show is like, she recalls what fellow contestant Luke Toki says.

“He tells people to go through a cold shower, fully-clothed, with the lights off for three days and don’t eat and that’s what it’s like playing Survivor.”

Side note… Mamamia interviews King of the Jungle, Luke Toki. Post continues after video.

The 46-year-old also shared how the experience changed her perspective on life.

“I think as people we’re always looking for something else, or what can I do next and what can I have next but what I realised is what I have is perfect and I don’t need anything else.”

Shaun Hampson, who was also a contestant on the 2019 season of Survivor Australia, recently told Mamamia that after being eliminated, he couldn’t stop eating.

“I had 18 days in the jury [villa] and I put on about seven or eight kilos, but it wasn’t the good weight. It was the bad type of weight and it just happened so fast and I realised then that I had to slow my eating down.

“I think you go into a primal thing where you go so long without food, that when you’ve got it in front of you, you have to eat it because you don’t know where your next meal’s coming from – so it was really hard to get out of that mindset and go back to normality.”

For more gossip celebrity news, sign up for our “Mamamia Celebrity” newsletter. The best entertainment stories of the day to help you unwind.