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We’ve all been there. We think to ourselves, Let’s just watch one more episode, or I’ll read one more chapter before turning off the light. The next thing you know, the clock reads 3:30 a.m., and you’ve traded valuable REM sleep for an overabundance of entertainment. Then the guilt sets in.
But a study from researchers at the University of Georgia suggests that binge-watching and -reading could actually be good for us. Engaging in bouts of marathon media consumption, they suggest in a paper published in Acta Psychologica, can make a person better able to remember what they consumed and “might help people recover from daily stressors through retrospective imagination.”
Their thinking goes like this: The longer someone imbibes stories in a single setting, the more deeply and longer their minds are engaged with them, even after the viewing or reading session ends. Even more so than for folks partaking of shorter, scheduled bursts of entertainment, the binger’s imagination is fired to the point that they fantasize about the characters, plot, and other story elements long after the screen is turned off or the book is closed.
Researchers had previously coined the phrase retrospective imaginative involvement to describe the act of intensely engaging with a narrative after the experience is over, using one’s imagination to mentally reconstruct the events and interact with the characters and plot. It turns out we already knew that this kind of imaginative exercise can have a couple of benefits, such as restoring depleted mental resources and coping with stressors. Earlier, researchers had also detailed the benefits of binge watching—including greater autonomy, relatedness, and psychological well-being. But it was unclear how the two phenomena were connected: whether the positive outcomes of bingeing on TV shows, movies, or books, were specifically due to the benefits of imaginatively engaging with the narrative after the fact, and whether bingeing or scheduled narrative consumption were greater drivers of that imaginative afterglow.
So the researchers surveyed about 300 undergraduate students at two midwestern universities, asking them about their media consumption habits and how they remained more or less involved with specific stories when they were not watching or reading about them.
They found a strong relationship between consecutive media consumption and the tendency for those binged stories to linger longer in the consciousness. Not only were binged stories more memorable among survey respondents, they were more likely to trigger extended imaginative involvement than stories consumed in a scheduled, periodic way.
“People who have that habit of binge-watching shows often aren’t doing it passively but are actually actively thinking about it afterward,” Joshua Baldwin, lead author of the study and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Georgia, said in a statement. “They’re very much wanting to engage with stories, even when they’re not around to watch shows.”
This, they suggest, could mean that bingeing TV shows or books could trigger even more of the restorative functions of extended imaginative involvement than waiting a week for the next episode to air or reading one chapter each night before succumbing to slumber.
Baldwin and his coauthors admit that the study had several limitations. For one, the survey was retrospective, asking participants to remember shows they’d watched or books they’d read. This means that the scientists couldn’t capture how stories affected thinking while they were in the midst of watching or reading them, reducing the accuracy of the data they culled from the recalled memories. Also, the study population was small and, being from midwestern universities, not necessarily representative of broad swaths of humanity. Finally, the study was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, when binge-watching became a way of life among the quarantined masses. “Our participants were likely to have the option to consume narratives more often and for longer amounts of time than they would normally,” they wrote in the paper. Tell me about it.
Even with these caveats, this study provides a ray of hope to the bingers among us. Perhaps these results can defray some of the crippling guilt and stigma associated with basking in the glow of that screen a little too long or laying awake and reading well past one’s bedtime. 
Lead image: HilaryDesign / Shutterstock
