Bianca Andreescu has been at the forefront of the mental health talk in tennis, being pretty open with her own struggles.
The Canadian took a mental health break to step away from tennis and spoke fondly about her time away from the sport and the WTA Tour. It was something that was needed for her to rediscover her passion for tennis, as she was able to return with a lot more hunger than she had before.
It's not the only mental health break we've seen recently in tennis, as several players opted to talk away from the game a bit, most notably Garbine Mugurza, who is still on hiatus. In a recent episode of the No Challenges Remaining podcast, Andreescu opened up about dealing with hate and social media in general.
Social media changed so much. And I feel like the focus is so much on that with sponsors and having to keep up with your fans and all of that. But then you end up seeing a negative comment, but you also see all these positive ones, but then you see that negative one and it's over.
I feel that for me, if I stay away as much as I can from social media, if I surround myself with people that I know I can trust because that's also hard when you get to a point.
She's not the only one that deals with social media hate because almost every player does. They all handle it differently, but younger people, in general, are more prone to be sucked into that habit of constantly spending time on social media.
We've seen it across industries with singers (Ed Sheeran), actors (Tom Holland), and many other prominent people stepping away from social media when they're not actively promoting their work. After all, we're all just people.
For Andreescu the impact is great because she has very high expectations of herself. That creates pressure, and it can become a vicious cycle that only gets amplified by external pressure which you can see on social media.
I mean, other people have obviously had, I can list all people who've won grand slams, but haven't found it easy to replicate either immediately or eventually the expectations catch up with you and the pressure catches up with you from internal, external, everything. And personally, I'm not the biggest fan. It really sucks your energy as well.
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