In a poignant message shared on social media by Ons Jabeur earlier this week, in which she announced she would be taking a break from professional tennis, one particular sentence stood out to me.<\/p>\n
\u201cRight now, I feel it’s time to take a step back and finally put myself first: to breathe, to heal, and to rediscover the joy of simply living,\u201d wrote the Tunisian tennis star.<\/p>\n
The joy of simply living \u2013 a fundamental need we often struggle to fulfil, or, even worse, forget to pursue.<\/p>\n
For professional athletes, especially tennis players, being on tour 11 months a year, chasing points, prize money, titles, and success, while constantly switching time zones and being away from loved ones, can make it increasingly difficult to find the joy of simply living.<\/p>\n
From the countless conversations I\u2019ve had with players over the years, I\u2019ve realised burn out hasn\u2019t just become a common occurrence in the world of professional tennis, it\u2019s become pretty much inevitable.<\/p>\n
While physical burnout can be easy to identify because it typically involves an injury or a specific pain felt in a specific part of the body, mental burnout is far trickier to detect.<\/p>\n
Players often attach their happiness \u2013 or lack thereof \u2013 to wins and losses on the court, and they find their identity too intertwined with tennis.<\/p>\n
That can be very dangerous in a sport where a competitor can lose every single week because only one champion is crowned at the end of each tournament. Everyone else walks away feeling like a loser.<\/p>\n
Those feelings a player attaches to every result can mask the true underlying struggles he or she is grappling with internally.<\/p>\n
\u00a0The easy \u2018fix\u2019 for most tennis players is to just power through, and look ahead to the new week in order to chase a better result. But sometimes powering through is not the answer and that\u2019s what Jabeur, and a few others, have come to realise.<\/p>\n
The former world No 2 has been battling injuries and illness for the majority of the last two years. She took four months off at the end of 2024 to deal with a shoulder issue but she still didn\u2019t look or feel like herself when she returned in 2025.<\/p>\n
\u201cDeep down, I haven\u2019t truly felt happy on the court for some time now,\u201d confessed Jabeur, who is famously dubbed the \u2018Minister of Happiness\u2019 back home in Tunisia.<\/p>\n
Her husband and fitness trainer Karim Kamoun posted a message on social media expressing his full support of Jabeur\u2019s decision.<\/p>\n
\u201cTrue strength isn\u2019t always found in pushing through. Sometimes, it\u2019s in knowing when to pause, breathe, and heal. Ons Jabeur\u2019s decision to step back isn\u2019t a setback, it’s the foundation of a powerful comeback,\u201d wrote Kamoun.<\/p>\n
\u201cChampions don\u2019t just fight; they know when to recover. And when she returns, it won\u2019t be as the same player \u2026 it\u2019ll be as something stronger.\u201d<\/p>\n
The more I speak to unhappy players on the tennis circuit, the more I understand the complexity of their situation. From the outside, it seems like taking the occasional break from competing and travelling is an obvious way to preserve one\u2019s mental health and avoid potential burnout.<\/p>\n
But taking time off is one of the hardest decisions a player can make.<\/p>\n
A couple of months ago at Roland Garros, Jabeur said her decision to stop competing last August because of her shoulder should have been taken much earlier but she felt the pressure to keep going<\/a>. <\/p>\n \u201cWe have a lot of guilt inside us, saying we’re not doing enough or it’s not enough,\u201d said the three-time major finalist.<\/p>\n \u201cThe pressure from sponsors, the pressure from the ranking, the pressure of providing, I don’t know, some players provide for their families as well. It is a very tough sport, unfortunately. I’m learning. I’m 30 years old, but I’m still learning in that.\u201d<\/p>\n Whether it\u2019s the 52-week ranking system that could see you drop points every week you don\u2019t perform well, or the bonus pool formula that penalises players for missing events by docking percentages from their end-of-season bonuses, or the mandatory tournaments scheme that could slap you with a zero-pointer for skipping one \u2013 it\u2019s essentially like having an F count towards your GPA. <\/p>\n There are many reasons tennis players feel like they can\u2019t walk away from the tour for a short while.<\/p>\n Which is why players like Jabeur \u2013 and many before her such as Amanda Anisimova, Naomi Osaka, Bianca Andreescu, and Emil Ruusuvuori to name a few \u2013 choosing to take a break is considered a bold and inspiring move.<\/p>\n In an ideal world, players would treat potential mental burnout the same way they would deal with possible physical issues. <\/p>\n Just like athletes pay a great deal of attention to injury prevention via work with their strength and conditioning coaches, why aren\u2019t more players looking ahead and thinking about their career longevity by preserving their mental health and keeping an eye out for early signs of mental burnout?<\/p>\n Several young players have told me they never think about taking time off or pacing themselves on tour because they want to \u201cmaximise\u201d on their current opportunities as much as possible because there is no guarantee how long they\u2019ll be able to compete at this level.<\/p>\n Grigor Dimitrov, who at 34, has navigated lots of highs and lows in tennis, believes many young players are surrounded by large teams that can insulate them from reality.<\/p>\n \u201cThey feel so protected. I always say that artificial surroundings that everyone has created around them, it does not allow things to go in,\u201d the Bulgarian told The National recently<\/a> at Wimbledon.<\/p>\n \u201cSo they’re more or less a little bit bulletproof but also they haven’t really seen disappointments, they haven’t really seen failures, they haven’t really seen bad things in their lives.<\/p>\n \u201cSo that already itself puts you in that cloud nine thing and you keep on rolling with it. Of course you want to capitalise the best you can.<\/p>\n \u201cThe younger you are, the more you do, the more money you get, the more everything has increased, the more popular you get, the more of the Instagrams and all the Twitters and the likes and all that, you get a lot more of it and I get it.\u201d<\/p>\n The flip side of that is that you can also ignore how you really feel.<\/p>\n Players such as Madison Keys and Andrey Rublev have found great value in working with psychologists rather than solely relying on mental coaches.<\/p>\n While a mental coach can give you tools to deal with stressful situations on court and other issues related to your tennis, psychologists will talk to you like a human being first.<\/p>\n \u201cI can only speak for myself. It’s been incredibly helpful to me,\u201d said Keys of her decision to speak to a therapist. <\/p>\n \u201cI’ve tried sports psychologists in the past, and I think for me just everything being so focused on just the sport and just tennis was not as helpful as I needed it to be.<\/p>\n \u201cReally going to someone and looking at my overall life and how that was influencing how I felt on the court probably made the biggest difference for me.<\/p>\n \u201cI feel like as tennis players, from a pretty young age, it just happens where our identity becomes very wrapped up in being a tennis player. <\/p>\n \u201cThat’s great, but when you have the tough kind of weeks, months, years on tour, that can really take a toll on how you think about yourself as a person.<\/p>\n \u201cSo being able to dive into that and figure out how to separate the two and know that you’re not just a tennis player, you’re a full person that has all of these other really great attributes and other interests and just different things in your life. <\/p>\n \u201cThat was really a really important piece for me, and I think that kind of made the tennis a little bit easier.\u201d<\/p>\n