Serena Williams urges Selena Gomez to set  limitations for her mental health in her book, Learning to Shut Down

Serena Williams Candid About Her Mental Health

In an Instagram clip shared by Selena Gomez on Monday, the pair dove into the topic of ‘mental fitness’ while engaging in a thoughtful conversation for the former Disney star's mental health platform, Wondermind.

Mental fitness for me is just really learning to shut down, Williams, 40, said. And you know I did this years ago before even mental health was a topic in everyone's mind.

Wondering is a startup co-founded by singer-cum-actor Gomez. The platform's main objective is to raise awareness and democratize and destigmatize mental health globally.

When Gomez asked Williams what mental fitness meant to her, the 23-time Grand Slam champion stated that she had developed a habit of shutting herself down over the years.

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The Encounter Between Williams and Gomez

The conversation with Gomez, 30, comes shortly after Williams announced that she's ‘evolving away’ from tennis in a first-person essay written for the September 2022 cover issue of Vogue.

Serena has never liked the word retirement, she wrote. It doesn't feel like a modern word to me. She has been thinking of this as a transition, but she wants to be sensitive about how she uses that word, which means something very specific and important to a community of people. Maybe the good word to describe what I'm up to is evolution.

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I'm here to tell you that I'm evolving away from tennis toward other things that are important to me. It comes after the sports star announced she would start evolving away from tennis but insisted she didn't want to use the word retirement.

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Williams wrote that she has been reluctant to admit to herself or the people around her that Serena has to move on from playing tennis.

There is no happiness in this topic for me, she wrote. She knows it's not the usual thing to say, but Serena feels great pain. It's the hardest thing that she could ever imagine. She hates it. She hates that she has to be at this crossroads.

Serena keeps saying to myself, I wish it could be easy for me, but it's not. I'm torn: I don't want it to be over, but at the same time, I'm ready for what's next.