Nearly five years after she pulled the plug on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Oprah Winfrey is revealing her decision to end the popular program was a “life-altering shift” that left her feeling “unbalanced.”

“For years I never had to think about what to do, or when to do it, because the show was all consuming. I longed for that elusive, ephemeral balance,” the 61-year-old media mogul said in a new interview.

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Oprah on ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show’ in December 2010.

“Once my life was mine to design, I found myself a bit unbalanced in structuring it. I’ve had to learn to plan what I want to do instead of always fulfilling the have to dos,” she continued.

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Oprah hosted ‘The Oprah Show’ for 25 years starting in 1986. During its run, the program won 47 daytime Emmy Awards. Since its culmination in 2011, the show remains the highest-rated talk show in American television history.

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Oprah on the April 2015 issue of ‘O, The Oprah Magazine.’

“When I decided to end ‘The Oprah Show,’ I knew my life without it would be forever different. And I was ready,” she said.

Earlier this month, news broke that Oprah is closing the Chicago studios of her multimedia production company, Harpo Productions, to instead focus on managing a much smaller production team in LA.

“It is the natural order of things,” she said in the new issue of ‘O, The Oprah Magazine.’ “I think that change can be absolutely positive because everything in nature tells us that life is constantly in motion, constantly moving us forward.”