\u201cIt’s been tough to deal with at times and it’s made me not want to be playing and competing at times throughout the year,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
“It’s definitely a lot in the stomach – you feel sick to your stomach. I’ve been struggling to sleep and then, because of the feeling in the stomach, struggling to eat well, eat enough.<\/p>\n
“It’s almost like a feeling of dread – that something bad is going to happen.”<\/p>\n
He may allow himself an occasional social hit but will otherwise switch off from tennis until the spring.<\/p>\n
Salisbury has plenty of plans in place, including a safari in Kenya, a skiing trip with his girlfriend’s family, and Christmas at home – which is not always possible for tennis players before a season which starts in Australia in early January.<\/p>\n
The current world number 10 played the whole of this season with fellow Briton Neal Skupski, and even though they did not win a title, they were runners-up at six events including the French Open, the US Open and last week’s ATP Finals in Turin.<\/p>\n
“I wouldn’t say it affected my tennis that much,” Salisbury said of his anxiety.<\/p>\n
“We’ve played well, especially the past six months. I feel like I’ve dealt with it well and managed to get myself into a good enough state on court to perform well in most of the matches that I have played.<\/p>\n
“But I think it’s taken an extra toll emotionally and mentally to do that. It’s meant that it’s just not been enjoyable being at a lot of the tournaments that I have played.<\/p>\n
“I haven’t spoken to too many people about the struggles that I have had – mainly my team, friends and family, so not too many people in the tennis world.<\/p>\n
“I think a lot of people don’t want to share too much because they don’t want other people to know about that, when you are having to go and compete against them.<\/p>\n
“But to be honest I don’t really mind if people do know. I’m sure it’s something which a lot of other people are having to deal with and I don’t think it would have any impact on me, as if anything over the past year it’s made me mentally stronger than before.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cIt’s been tough to deal with at times and it’s made me not want to be playing and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":295080,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[565],"tags":[64,63,85,747],"class_list":["post-295079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295079"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295079\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/295080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}