When I open Netflix, I feel the confidence of someone about to make a bold, interesting choice. But 20 minutes later, like many other college students, I’m still scrolling through options, half-convinced I’ve already watched every good show ever made.
There is a very specific moment during the nightly streaming service scroll when hope dies, usually somewhere between “Critically Acclaimed” and “Because You Watched Something Once in 2017.” Eventually, I do what I always do — rewatch something I could explain beat-for-beat in court. The theme song starts, my shoulders drop and I pretend this was the plan all along.
With more options than ever, rewatching seems unnecessary. However, psychologically, the habit of rewatching doesn’t stem from boredom or nostalgia. It is rooted in comfort, control and how our brains respond to stress. As it turns out, this isn’t a failure to try new things — it’s a coping strategy, one especially suited to college students.
Why New Isn’t Always Better
All of the titles, genres and algorithms can make deciding what to watch feel like a chore. Faced with too many options, we freeze, second-guess ourselves and occasionally give up entirely. Psychologists call this choice overload — or, less flatteringly, the paradox of choice.
For most college students, we have the most free time to relax in the evening, after papers have been submitted, lecture notes have been touched up and textbooks have finally been closed. After a day filled with weighted decisions, our mental resources are exhausted and the quality of our decisions begins to deteriorate. This is known as decision fatigue.
After a long day of exhausting decision-making, your brain starts opting for shortcuts. Choice overload compounds this mental exhaustion and causes us to reach a state of decision fatigue faster. By the time the day ends and we’re in bed ready to decompress, our brains are too tired to make an educated choice and instead fall into familiar patterns that we know will tickle the right parts of our brains.
Comfort of the Familiar
Psychologists have found that people gravitate toward familiar media when they are feeling stressed or emotionally drained. Think about an average week in the fall semester, when you weren’t feeling stressed and emotionally drained. It’s almost a baseline for college students.
Although watching a new show or movie can be entertaining, it can also be stressful, especially if you’re already stressed at low levels. Research backs up what our streaming habits already know — we like things more the more we see them. Psychologists call this the mere exposure effect, which is a fancy way of saying that familiarity breeds affection. When we’ve encountered something before, our brains don’t have to work as hard to process it the next time around. That ease, known as perceptual fluency, feels good.
And when something feels good, we tend to trust it, like it and, in the case of TV shows, eventually click on its title again without overthinking it. This comfort is especially compelling for college students, like incoming freshmen, who are thrown into a completely new environment. Everything is new and stressful, and our brains are working overtime to memorize the best routes to class and make a packed schedule work, all while remembering to take care of ourselves, so even choosing a meal feels burdensome. This causes us to seek reprieve wherever we can, and if that means watching the same shows over and over, so be it.
No Surprises, No Stress
The truth is, rewatching the same shows has very little to do with the story and everything to do with emotional self-preservation. We already know what happens, who ends up together and exactly which episode is going to emotionally wreck us, and we’re coming back for those feelings. Rewatching is a deliberate choice to recreate an emotional experience we already trust, like returning to a restaurant because nothing on the menu can surprise you anymore.
Knowing what’s coming lets us manage our emotions with surprising precision. We know when to laugh, when to relax and when to emotionally check out entirely. This kind of control is especially appealing during stressful stretches, like any day on a college campus, when everything else feels loud, busy and slightly out of our hands.
Rewatching also lowers the mental bar to entry. The characters have already been introduced, the stakes explained and our brains don’t have to do any heavy lifting. According to cognitive load theory, our brains seek efficiency when we’re feeling drained and our mental resources are depleted, which explains why rewatching a show can be so comforting.
With the cognitive work out of the way, we’re free to actually enjoy the experience, spotting jokes we missed the first time, noticing small background details or deepening our attachment to characters we already know won’t betray us. When life feels chaotic, returning to something consistent can feel grounding and refreshing.
A Sense of Control
Part of the appeal of rewatching shows comes down to control. Not the illusion of controlling the world, but knowing exactly what will happen next. Psychologists call this perceived control, and research shows that even a modest sense of it can reduce stress and anxiety. When the world feels unpredictable — deadlines pile up, a guy almost hits you with his scooter and you face plant in the slush walking to the lecture hall — rewatching a show offers a rare guarantee. You know exactly when a line will land or an emotional beat will hit, and the places you can disengage without missing anything essential.
That predictability is minor, almost absurdly so, but it works. Your brain recognizes the order, your stress response eases and suddenly, watching television is less a form of entertainment than a minimal yet reliable form of self-regulation.
So no, it isn’t a crime to rewatch your comfort TV shows on loop after a hard week. You can still aspire to watch new, challenging, culturally relevant television — you just don’t need to treat rewatching as a personal failure in the meantime. Rewatching familiar shows isn’t making you dumber or eroding your cognitive abilities; it’s a psychologically proven escape from decision-making, emotional labor, and the general chaos of daily life.
Considering the collective stress on campus, that break might actually be doing some good. If that means pressing play on the same random sitcom for the third time this month, so be it. If rewatching the same show gives you one small, predictable win in an otherwise chaotic week, it’s probably doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.
Mia Kirisits is a sophomore majoring in psychology.
Views expressed in the opinions pages represent the opinions of the columnists. The only piece that represents the view of the Pipe Dream Editorial Board is the staff editorial.