You Lost Three Hours at Open Play Again. Psychologists Have a Name for That.

You told everyone you’d be home by ten. You showed up at 8:15 for “a couple of games,” and the next time you looked at your phone it was 11:40. You had two missed calls and a text that just said ”??”. Your water bottle was empty and you couldn’t have told anyone the score of a single game.

Your spouse calls this a problem. A psychologist would call it flow, and it turns out pickleball is unusually good at producing it. That includes the Tuesday morning open play you keep promising to leave early.

The research nobody expected

Glynis Worthington took the long route to studying pickleball. She graduated from Iowa State in marketing in 1983 and ran in the Iowa Senior Games before going back to school at the University of Northern Iowa in 2018. She has said part of the motivation was her dad, who loved being active but struggled to find a purpose once he retired.

For her doctoral dissertation, she surveyed 231 recreational doubles players aged 50 and older using the Dispositional Flow Scale-2. It’s a 36-question instrument that measures how often you tend to experience flow in a given activity. Her players reported flow across all nine of the dimensions the scale measures, and on average they scored higher than the collegiate and professional athletes measured in earlier studies.

This year she and four co-authors published a paper in the Journal of Aging and Physical Activity looking at players 60 and up, with the same basic conclusion: recreational doubles produces strong flow in older players.

Careful with the headline version, though. “Retirees out-flow college athletes” is a cross-study comparison, not a head-to-head experiment, and older adults might just rate their experiences more generously. Nobody put a Division I point guard and a 68-year-old in the same lab. Still, rec players at a local park scoring higher on average than people who play sports for a living is worth taking seriously.

What flow actually is

The concept comes from psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who spent decades interviewing rock climbers, surgeons, chess players and dancers about the times they felt most absorbed in what they were doing. Their descriptions kept overlapping, and he boiled them down to nine features: a balance between challenge and skill, action and awareness merging, clear goals, immediate feedback, total concentration, a sense of control, loss of self-consciousness, a distorted sense of time, and doing the thing for its own sake.

Now look at that list and picture a doubles point.

Every rally gives you a clear goal: get to the line, keep it low, wait for the pop-up. The feedback shows up in seconds, because the ball either clears the net or it doesn’t. The kitchen slows the game down enough that a 70-year-old and a 35-year-old can actually trade dinks. And having a partner splits the pressure so no single point lands entirely on you. Pickleball didn’t set out to be a flow machine, but most of the conditions come built in.

Worthington found another ingredient I didn’t expect. Playing with strangers made the experience stronger. She calls it the “Playground Effect,” and her description is the best summary of open play I’ve read: “There’s no who’s who or social structure. You just have a wonderful time.” Nobody at the courts knows you were a regional VP. You’re the person with the good backhand dink, and that’s all anybody needs to know about you.

The channel, and how open play breaks it

Here’s the catch, and it’s the part that matters for your Saturday.

Csikszentmihalyi drew flow as a channel. Above the channel, the challenge outruns your skill and you feel anxious. Below it, your skill outruns the challenge and you get bored. Flow only happens in the band between, where the game is hard enough to need all of you and not so hard that it scares you.

Open play is a slot machine for matchups. You get stacked against two newer players, go up 9-1, and start trying around-the-post shots out of sheer boredom. Then the paddle rack spits you onto a court with two 4.5s who speed up everything, and you spend twenty minutes trying not to touch the ball. Neither game had any flow in it.

Worthington’s data has a second catch. The factors that predicted flow were how often people played, how many years they’d been playing, and whether they played tournaments. (Marital status showed up too. I’m not touching that one.) Age, gender, education and location didn’t predict anything.

So flow isn’t handed out at the gate. A beginner’s first month is mostly the anxious side of the channel, which might explain why some people quit before they ever feel the good version. The players who report the most flow are the ones who kept showing up long enough for the game to fit them.

How to get more of the good games

You can’t control the paddle rack, but you can control a surprising amount of what happens once you’re on the court.

Play up half a level, not a full one. If you get to choose your court, pick the one where you’ll win maybe four games out of ten. That’s the top edge of the channel. Playing a full level up mostly teaches you to flinch.

When the game is too easy, give yourself a handicap. You’re up 8-2 and bored. Don’t start bagging the 3.0 to make it interesting. Add a constraint nobody else has to know about. Only dink to the middle. Make five dinks before you’re allowed to speed up. Serve every ball deep to the backhand. The game gets hard again, you get some practice in, and the newer players get a real game instead of a beating.

When the game is too hard, shrink the goal. You aren’t beating these two today. Fine. Pick a target you can actually hit: get every return deep, get to the line on every return game, land three drops in a row. Clear goals are one of the nine conditions, and “don’t embarrass yourself” doesn’t count as one.

Protect the loss of self-consciousness. This is the most fragile part of flow, and rec courts are great at wrecking it. Don’t check your DUPR between games. Don’t narrate your own errors to your partner. And if you’re the one handing out mid-game tips, you’re pulling your partner out of the channel and making them think about their wrist while you watch.

Rotate with strangers sometimes. Your fixed foursome is great, but everybody there remembers who poached whom in 2024. Every couple of weeks, put your paddle in the rack and play with people you don’t know. That’s when Worthington’s playground shows up.

Use the time between points. One annoyed mutter after a netted drop and you’re out of the channel. A short between-point routine is basically a way of stepping back in forty times a game.

The bill for those three hours

Flow has a dark side, and pickleball players should hear about it.

One of the nine dimensions is that time feels different. That’s the thing that makes 8:15 turn into 11:40, and it’s lovely. It’s also why nobody notices their elbow until the drive home. The same absorption that makes the game feel so good is the reason you play game seven when your body checked out after game four. Another dimension is doing the activity for its own sake, which is a polite way of saying you’ll keep doing it after it stops being a good idea. If you’ve read our list of signs you’re a pickleball addict and felt seen, now you know the mechanism.

There’s some good news here. A separate study published last fall in Frontiers in Psychology surveyed 1,667 players and found that people who played three or more times a week scored higher on a standard well-being index than people who played twice or less (77.5 versus 73.5 out of 100). Players with prior injuries scored lower no matter how often they played, though. So the long sessions seem to help, but only while you stay healthy enough to keep playing them.

So set a phone alarm for the time you actually need to leave, and believe it when it goes off. And take new aches seriously, because your tendons don’t care how good the session felt.

What the 8 a.m. crowd figured out

People like to make fun of the retirees who’ve been at the courts since sunrise. Worthington’s numbers suggest they’ve found something most athletes spend whole careers chasing: a few hours a week where they stop thinking about anything except the next ball.

They didn’t get there because pickleball is easy. They got there because they kept showing up, chose games that fit, and played with whoever was next on the rack. You can do the same thing. Just text home before you start.