"Padel, the yips and addiction walk into a bar...."

I should probably start with a confession.

I am a clinical hypnotherapist. I specialise in anxiety, performance issues, and addiction. I spend my time helping people understand the psychological loops that keep them stuck — the patterns the subconscious runs on autopilot, long after they've stopped serving any useful purpose.

I also play padel up to three times a week, check my phone obsessively for court cancellations, and have explained to my family on more than one occasion why I needed yet another pair of padel shoes.

The irony is not lost on me.

But here's the thing I've come to understand, both as a player and as a practitioner: padel is one of the most psychologically revealing sports I've ever encountered. It hooks you faster than almost anything else. It exposes your anxiety in ways you didn't expect. And for a significant number of players, the ritual doesn't end when you leave the court.

This article is my attempt to make sense of all of that — not as an academic exercise, but as an honest set of observations from someone who has spent a long time looking at how the mind works, and who is not immune to any of it.

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Why Padel Hooks You So Fast

Padel is, on the surface, a simple sport. A glass-walled court roughly a third the size of a tennis court. An underarm serve. A solid, stringless racket. Doubles format. The walls are in play, which means the ball stays alive longer and rallies last longer than most beginners expect.

That accessibility is part of the hook. Unlike tennis, which can take months before a rally feels satisfying, padel delivers enjoyment almost immediately. Most new players experience their first genuinely good rally within their first session. That matters, because enjoyment is dopamine — and dopamine is the engine of habit formation.

But padel goes further than simple accessibility. It delivers dopamine at multiple levels simultaneously, which is what makes it so difficult to put down.

Every good shot rewards you. Every rally you survive longer than you expected. Every point won against a better pair. The glass walls mean that a lucky defensive shot — a desperate flick that somehow stays in — gets the same round of applause as a perfectly placed smash. Lucky shots can be claimed as intentional. Instinctive get-out-of-jail moments feel enormously satisfying. Even the sound and feel of ball on padel racket delivers its own small hit.

This is what I mean by a multi-level dopamine loop. Small wins, frequent enough to keep you coming back. Difficult enough that you keep improving. Social enough that the connection with your partner and opponents adds its own layer of reward.

It is, in the language of behavioural psychology, a near-perfect variable reward schedule. The same architecture that makes slot machines compelling, social media scrollable, and certain substances impossible to put down.

The difference — and it is an important one — is that padel's loop is attached to something genuinely good for you. Physical exercise. Social connection. Fresh air. Cognitive challenge. Measurable improvement over time.

Addiction isn't always destructive. Sometimes the subconscious latches onto something that serves it well. Padel, for most people, is one of those things.

But "most people" is doing some work in that sentence.

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The Yips: Why Padel Is Uniquely Cruel

Let me introduce you to a concept that most padel players have experienced but few speak about.

The yips are defined clinically as a psycho-neuromuscular impediment — a breakdown in the execution of fine motor skills under pressure. They are best known in golf, where a professional player finds themselves unable to execute a routine putt they have made ten thousand times in practice. They occur in darts, in cricket, in baseball. Anywhere that a highly practised, technically simple movement suddenly becomes impossible under scrutiny.

Padel is, I would argue, disproportionately fertile ground for the yips. And the reason comes down to the nature of the sport itself.

Padel rewards touch, finesse, and precision over power. The shots that win points are often delicate — a soft drop shot near the cage, a perfectly weighted volley, a controlled lob under pressure. These are fine motor skills. And fine motor skills are exactly what the yips target.

The enclosed glass court removes all ambiguity. In tennis, a missed shot disappears into open space. In padel, it bounces off a wall, or fails to clear the net in front of three people standing close enough to hear you exhale. There is nowhere to hide. The glass box that makes padel exciting is the same glass box that amplifies every error.

The doubles format adds a further layer. You are not just observed by your opponents. You are observed by your partner. Every missed shot is witnessed by someone who is relying on you — someone whose reaction you are monitoring even as you try to focus on the ball. Research on the yips consistently identifies fear of negative evaluation, perfectionist tendencies, and performance anxiety as the primary psychological drivers. Padel's social structure puts all three on the court simultaneously. Next time you see your partners eyes look to the sky when you make an error, note how it makes you feel the next time you try the same shot.

And then there is the serve.

The padel serve is underarm. It is, technically, one of the simplest actions in any racket sport. A gentle drop of the ball, a controlled swing, contact below waist height. A beginner executes it without thinking. Which is precisely why, for some experienced players, it becomes the site of something close to paralysis.

The yips thrive in exactly this space — where an action is simple enough that there is nothing to blame if it goes wrong, visible enough that failure is acutely embarrassing, and repetitive enough that the conscious mind has had time to start interfering with what should be an automatic movement.

I have watched competent, experienced padel players double-fault on a serve under the microscope of a competitive point, that they could execute perfectly 1000 times in other circumstances, . I have spoken to players who dread the serve more than any other part of the game. The shot itself hasn't changed. What has changed is the weight of attention placed on it.

This is the paradox at the heart of the yips: the more you try to control a movement consciously, the more you disrupt the subconscious process that was executing it perfectly. Overthinking doesn't just fail to help — it actively makes things worse.

The treatments that work for the yips are, perhaps unsurprisingly, the same ones that work for performance anxiety more broadly. Reducing self-focused attention. Rebuilding automatic motor patterns through low-pressure repetition. Addressing the underlying fear of negative evaluation. Working, in other words, at the subconscious level where the pattern actually lives.

Which is, as it happens, exactly what clinical hypnotherapy does.

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After the Match: When the Loop Continues

Here is something that doesn't get talked about much in the breathless coverage of padel's extraordinary rise.

The sport has a drinking culture built into it.

Not in a dark or unusual way — in the entirely normalised, socially ritualised way that characterises many sports at club level. The post-match drink is part of the padel experience in a way that feels almost inseparable from the sport itself. Clubs are designed around it. The social dynamic of the game — four people who have just spent an hour in an enclosed space together, competing and laughing and occasionally infuriating each other — creates a natural gravitational pull towards continuing that connection at the bar.

For most players, this is entirely benign. The post-match drink is a social reward, an extension of the community, a pleasant way to decompress.

But I observe something else in some players, and I think it is worth naming.

For a subset of padel enthusiasts — often the most competitive, most driven, most perfectionist players — the drink after the match is doing more work than it appears. The alcohol is extending the dopamine loop. Softening the edge of a match that didn't go as well as they wanted. Quieting the inner critic that spent ninety minutes telling them they weren't good enough. Providing a reliable, predictable hit of reward at the end of an experience that, however enjoyable, also carried anxiety and pressure and the sting of errors.

In other words, the drink is working psychologically in the same way that the first glass of wine works after a difficult day in the office. It is not simply social. For some people, it is medicating something.

I am not suggesting that post-match drinks are a problem for most padel players. They aren't. But I have sat with enough clients who describe their relationship with alcohol through the lens of sport — where the social context made it feel normal long past the point where it was serving them — to know that the culture is worth being honest about.

The question worth asking is a simple one: are you having a drink because you want one, or because not having one feels uncomfortable?

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The Positive Case — And It Is Genuine

I want to be clear that everything above is written by someone who loves this sport. I am not making an argument against padel. I am making an argument for honesty about what it does to you — because honest engagement with something is always better than unconscious participation in it.

The positive case for padel is real and substantial.

The physical benefits are well documented — cardiovascular fitness, coordination, agility, joint-friendly movement patterns that make it genuinely accessible to players well into their later years. I play at 58 and find it as physically engaging as anything I have done.

The cognitive benefits are less often discussed but significant. Padel is a problem-solving sport. Every point requires rapid spatial reasoning, anticipation of two opponents' movements, coordination with a partner, and real-time adjustment of shot selection. That kind of cognitive engagement is genuinely good for the brain — particularly as we age.

The social benefits may be the most important of all. Padel builds community in a way that solitary exercise cannot. The doubles format means you are always playing with someone, always relying on someone, always in conversation with someone. For many players — particularly those who have come to the sport from high-pressure professional environments — padel provides a form of genuine human connection that is harder to find than it should be.

And then there is the simple fact of presence. Padel demands your full attention in a way that is, paradoxically, a form of rest. While you are on court, you cannot think about the email you haven't sent or the decision you're avoiding. The ball is coming. That is all.

For my clients who carry anxiety, who perform under pressure, who find it difficult to truly switch off — I sometimes recommend padel, qualified by everything above. The key is conscious participation. Knowing what the sport gives you. Knowing what it asks of you. Knowing when it is serving you and when it has started to serve something else.

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A Final Thought

The subconscious mind runs on patterns. It doesn't distinguish between a padel court and a boardroom, between a missed serve and a missed target at work, between the relief of a post-match drink and the relief of a drink after a difficult meeting.

The mechanisms are the same. The outcomes depend on what those mechanisms are attached to — and how consciously you're engaging with them.

Padel, at its best, is one of the most joyful things you can do with an hour and three other people. I say that without reservation.

But if you recognise something in what you've read here — if the performance anxiety, the self-criticism, the post-match ritual feels familiar beyond the sport — it's worth a conversation.

That's what I'm here for.

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Patrick Collins is a Clinical Hypnotherapist and Transformative Coach based in Horsham, West Sussex. He works with clients experiencing anxiety, addiction, and performance issues at Sussex Hypnotherapy Clinics and Patrick Collins Coaching. He can be contacted via [sussexhypnotherapyclinics.com](https://www.sussexhypnotherapyclinics.com) or by dropping a message directly.

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