Obama said she has been going through "those emotional highs and lows that I think everybody feels, where you just don't feel yourself."

"These are not, they are not fulfilling times, spiritually," she said. "I know that I am dealing with some form of low-grade depression.

"Not just because of the quarantine, but because of the racial strife, and just seeing this administration, watching the hypocrisy of it, day in and day out, is dispiriting."

Michelle Obama and Barack Obama, America's first black president, took up residence in Washington after he left the White House in January 2017.

She also said it is "exhausting" to be "waking up to yet another story of a black man or a black person somehow being dehumanized, or hurt, or killed, or falsely accused of something."

"And it has led to a weight that I haven't felt in my life, in a while," she said.

Obama said it was important to remember that "we've been through tough times in this nation" before.