London - It's an affliction of the modern age. You sit down to watch just one episode of Breaking Bad – but somehow find yourself still on the sofa ten episodes later.
Now scientists have found out why we “binge watch” these television box sets – our brains switch off and watching the next episode becomes automatic.
We suspend our ability to consciously think about what we are doing while binge watching our favourite TV shows – and so cannot stop.
Neither do we think about “goal conflict”, the scientific name for whatever we should be doing instead of watching that extra episode.
The finding will be a warning to people who have subscriptions to services like Netflix, which gives viewers unlimited online access to films and TV shows for a monthly fee.
One of the service’s key features is how it automatically starts the next episode of a show 15 seconds after the end of the last one.
Researchers from the University of Ottawa in Canada and Newcastle University asked 86 people to complete an online questionnaire.
It covered how often they watched TV, how often they binged and “goal conflict”.
On average respondents binge watched TV shows just over once a week. The results showed that bingeing was more likely when people forgot about what we were supposed to be doing – known as “automaticity”.
The experts suggested that online streaming services introduce interruptions after a certain amount of time in order to jolt us out of this automatic state.
Writing in the Journal of Health Psychology, they reported: “The role of automaticity suggests that interventions aiming to address problematic binge watching could consider techniques that address automaticity.
“For example, some online streaming services include inbuilt interruptions after a number of consecutive episodes have been viewed.”
Previous studies have found that binge watching is bad for your health and is linked to depression and loneliness.
People who suffer from low moods are more likely to spend hours or days watching multiple episodes of their favourite programme.
But by doing so you could neglect your work and social life – and even your family.
A survey conducted by TV industry analysts BARB defined “binge viewing” as watching 2.3 episodes in one go. However, many watch more than that. In one study, a student reported watching 49 episodes of the TV show Lost in two weeks, the equivalent of 3.4 episodes per day.
Daily Mail