Rewatching Your Favourite TV Shows Is Good For You

It turns out rewatching your favourite TV shows is actually good for you, according to a new study.

We all have our favourite show, the one you put on at the end of a hard day and it feels like being surrounded by old friends.

They're predictable, often funny, and seem to get better with time.

Now, it seems that there might actually be something behind our compulsions to rewatch our favourite series.

Professor Shira Gabriel, of the University of Buffalo, conducted research into the human experience and found that humans just want to belong – cute right?

Well, it seems that our favourite stories do just that, providing us with a surrogate sense of comfort.

See Mum, I told you there was a reason I wanted to re-watch Gilmore Girls for the fifth time.

Professor Gabriel explained to Time: "There’s this strong, very old evolutionary system in us that pulls us towards wanting these comforting narratives.

"Throughout human history and all known places around the world, human beings have lived in collectives.

"We believe that people evolved to have a mechanism that draws them to other folks."

So, rewatching The Simpsons is actually adaptive.

This instinct is obviously quite new, as back when we were dwelling in caves, our favourite shows didn't exist.

"There was really no reason for humans to evolve a mechanism to differentiate between the real people in our lives and the people who become real in our minds," Gabriel continued.

The professor found that those who rewatched their favourite shows felt less lonely, and explained: "It’s actually a very healthy part of maintaining a strong sense of self and sense of connection in the modern world,” she says of rewatching shows."

Gabriel conducted four separate studies to cement this idea, and said: "Study 1 demonstrated that people report turning to favored television programs when feeling lonely, and feel less lonely when viewing those programs.

"Study 2 demonstrated that experimentally activating belongingness needs leads people to revel longer in descriptions of favored (but not non-favored) television programs."

Study three found that rewatching TV acted as a buffer for drops in self-esteem, and study four found that even just thinking about our favourite shows reduced the activation of rejection-related words in our brains.

So, rewatching our favourite shows might even make us kinder to ourselves in the long run.

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