The Chase star, who has Asperger's syndrome, eventually regained her composure and decided to stay for now.
Before entering the jungle, Hegerty opened up to The Sun about how her condition will affect her time on the show and said the producers will be monitoring her behaviour closely.
"The show bosses seem more anxious about my autism than I do," she told The Sun.
"They keep saying, 'You must say if there's a problem', and I keep saying, 'I'll be fine.' And they keep saying, 'No, that's not good enough. You have to promise to tell us if there's a problem'.
"I might get 'peopled out'; there might just be too many people around. I might feel like going to sit in the pool until everyone has shut up a bit. On the other hand it might have advantages. If I'm not as good as other people at picking up on bad atmospheres I'll be happy drifting along."
Hegerty told The Sun she's also worried about failing to recognise her camp mates.
"One problem I have, that goes along with autism is being faceblind," she said.
"So there's a real possibility of getting some of the camp mates mixed up, which will be very embarrassing."
Hegerty was officially diagnosed with Asperger's in 2005, two years after first suspecting she might have the condition.
"I think that I saw a documentary on TV (about Asperger's) and there was just something about it that rung bells in my brain," Hegerty said on UK TV show Loose Women. "I remember in my diary writing, 'I'm beginning to suspect again that I have Asperger's syndrome.'"
Hegerty said the diagnosis "made sense of a lot of things" and helped her understand why she has difficulty multi-tasking and struggles to keep her house tidy.
"Some people say, 'You don't seem autistic. Where do you keep your autism?' I'm like, 'It's behind my front door and you're not coming in!'" she said on Loose Women.
The Chase star, who has been appearing on the UK version of the show since 2010 and the Aussie version since 2015, also revealed she never takes holidays.
"My idea of time off… is just simply to stay home and relax and just surf around on the internet," she said.
"I just need everything to go quiet, everyone to stop bothering me… I like to have my own kitchen… and washing machine."
Hegerty has spoken about having Asperger's before and previously told the Loose Women hosts that she was at breaking point a couple of years before landing her TV gig.
"On New Year's Day 2008 I had two bailiffs turn up on my doorstep because I had so little income, I had not been paying bills," she said. "I just couldn't quite get it together.
"A terribly helpful social worker named Jeff Mackenzie came and said to me, 'Don't worry about a thing, I will open the mail, we will get the bills paid, I will get you filling in the forms so you can actually be on benefits.'
"He also sent me to someone who helped me fill in forms to get disability living allowance which I still get," she said last year.
The Chase airs on TVNZ at 5pm weekdays.
