Sarah Paulson struggles to shake off "harrowing" scenes when she is making a horror movie.

The 49-year-old actress plays a mother trying to protect her two young children while living through devastating dust storms in 1930s Oklahoma in her latest film 'Hold Your Breath' and she's revealed it was difficult to switch off at the end of filming because she's not good at compartmentalising her work.

She told Deadline.com: "I wish I could say I was one of those people who knew how to compartmentalise. I’m not very good at it.

"So, I’m not a person who can kind of do a particularly harrowing scene or deal with something particularly upsetting and then just sort of go about figuring out what I’m gonna eat for dinner. I’m not very good at that.

"I need to get better at that because the consequence of course means I end up carrying some of it around longer than I would like to."

She went on to add: "I wish I had a real answer of how I shake it because sometimes I don’t think that I do, I think it all just gets into the sort of nooks and crannies of my being and makes a house there.

"So, I’m not always the best at alleviating some of that. I mean, I could say, ‘Yeah, I take a bath,’ but that would sort of be a lie. I think some part of it is … it is a muscle, it’s like an acting muscle that I have."

In the Hulu Original movie, Sarah plays "a woman who is trapped by increasingly perilous dust storms and is haunted by her past encounters with a threatening presence and takes extraordinary measures to protect her family."

The movie was filmed in New Mexico and Sarah has revealed battling the dust every day was extremely difficult.

She told USA Today: "We had a specific hand signal that we would do if the dust was too much or I couldn't actually see or if I got something in my eye.

"We got into a little bit of a back-and-forth about how dangerous vs. how hyper-real that they wanted to make [the scenes].

"And I was always like, ‘I just want you to push it, just put a little bit more wind on me, just a little bit more dirt in the air’ because the more real it could be for me, I thought the more truthful my performance would be.

"I'm just interested in authenticity. I'm interested in a kind of rigorous honesty in my work and in my life. And so sometimes with that comes some things you don't always want, like a big ol' piece of dirt in your eye."