Finnish NHLer Felt Burnout From Sport Specialization Lifestyle

Burnout is a common side effect suffered by athletes who are opting to pursue a single sport specialization experience. It’s often seen in teenagers who come to discover that the devotion they’ve given to one sport isn’t going to be paying dividends in a pro career, or even a college scholarship.

However, just because someone who specializes in one sport proves to be talented enough to be among the one percent who end up playing that sport for a living, it doesn’t mean that when they reach the end of the road in their sport, they won’t experience similar withdrawal symptoms from existing within a tunnel vision experience for the majority of their lives.

Such a malady wound up afflicting Finnish hockey player Jesse Joensuu. Good enough to be selected 60th overall in the NHL entry draft, and talented enough to play 129 NHL games for the New York Islanders and Edmonton Oilers, Joensuu’s 19-season pro career came to an end following the 2023-24 season. And he was a completely lost person once his life became one in which he was trying to exist without hockey.

“I felt like I was nothing anymore,” Joensuu told Finnish website Ilta-Sanomat. 

Mentally, he was a mess. Joensuu was dealing with crippling self-esteem issues. 

“Even though I had prepared myself in advance for the moment of quitting, it was still really difficult to find meaning in my new life,” Joensuu admitted. “My thoughts were really dark.”

His entire worth as a human being was completely connected to being a hockey player.

“As a player, I focused solely on performing on the ice,” Joensuu said. “Everything else was irrelevant – in a way, even my own children. If I had to think about their health, I thought that would be best achieved by playing well.”

All of his life’s accomplishments were measured by what he was able to achieve while on the ice.

“When the new season started in the fall of 2024, I felt really empty because I wasn't part of the team and couldn't measure myself anymore,” Joensuu said. “I knew things were fine, but my subconscious was feeding me other information.

“It was an unexpectedly long process to change from a hockey player to an ex-hockey player and then to an ordinary citizen.”