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Here’s Why Your Love of Netflix Could Actually Be Therapeutic.

RELATIONAL TRAUMA RECOVERY • February 20, 2016

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

Is there a show or movie you watch over and over before bed to help calm you down and comfort you in the evenings?

If I were to ask you to list your hobbies, would watching Netflix/Amazon Prime/Hulu be among them?

Do you have an ever-growing list of “your shows and movies”? A series that you’re completely hooked into?

Do you tend to get lost in an episode or cinema experience and then feel a bit of loss when the credits roll and you transition back to real life?

If so, that’s perfectly okay! Far from any of this being a so-called “bad thing,” I want to share my perspective as a psychotherapist with you about why your deep love of certain shows and movies can actually be a perfectly legitimate tool for personal growth plus share some inquiries and resources with you that will help make your next round of movie or TV watching a little more therapeutic (yes, really!).

In Praise of The Digital Campfire.

Since time immemorial we humans have had a need to learn how the world works. What our place in it is. And how to navigate all the stuff of life.

As psychotherapist Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD talks about across her breadth of work, much of this life instruction was imparted through oral storytelling, local wisdom sharing, and swapped tales passed down through the generations. Today in our modern world, the act of gathering around a campfire to learn about life from an elder seems to have all but disappeared and, instead, I would argue, most of us now gather around a proverbial digital campfire consciously or unconsciously to seek out the same thing.

Yep, that’s right: the glow of our computer screens, tablets, and big screen TV’s comprise today’s modern digital campfire and the stories and plot lines throughout much of what we watch have become a kind of life instruction and inspiration instead.

So is this really such a bad thing? Not necessarily.

While I think there are legitimate and pressing concerns about the type and amount of media that we collectively consume (and allow our children to consume), I don’t believe in pathologizing watching movies and TV shows as “all bad”. I truly believe that there’s a way in which this can be a very useful tool for our personal growth. All thanks to the modeling and instructing, accessing and processing, and calming and containment movies and TV can provide for us.

Modeling & Instructing.

In a very legitimate way, movies and TV shows can help meet that basic need we all have. To understand how this whole human life thing works. Shows and movies can model for us how to be in relationship. Or how to chase our dreams. Or what other lives and options for us might be possible. Ad it can passively and actively teach us about so many other elements of life.

For example, a young woman once shared with me that while she was growing up (largely emotionally neglected by her parents in childhood), it was thanks to watching Full House that she learned what might be possible between parents and kids, that warmth and concern and curiosity could exist, and that children could be deeply loved by the adults in their lives. To this day, Full House serves as an inspiration for her in parenting her own children. And in parenting the “little girl inside of her.”

For example, in the early 19th century this type of teaching could be found in the Grimm Brothers’ old tales (pre-editing) which were tremendously dark and cautionary tales for children and their parents. A modern day equivalent that might fall neatly into that cautionary category could be Breaking Bad (whose arguable cautions for us all include paying teachers more and pursuing less high risk forms of entrepreneurship if we want to take financial care of our families).

I honestly believe that movies and TV (not to mention books and podcasts and songs and theatre) are our modern day storytellers and that when we login into Netflix (or Amazon Prime or Hulu, etc.), there’s a way in which we still unconsciously gather around our proverbial digital campfires to receive instructions and inspiration on the perennial stuff of life.

Accessing & Processing.

Another way that movies and TV shows can be therapeutic and help us in our own personal growth is that they help us access different parts of ourselves, allowing us to feel into those aspects, and safely give voice to and process those pieces of us that potentially don’t get to be expressed in our day-to-day lives.

For example, who among us hasn’t left the cinema after watching some superhero or science fiction movie feeling on top of the world and like we could take on anything? That movie likely touched us in some way, connected us to our own archetypal internal hero and made us feel stronger and more empowered in our own lives if even for a short while.

I recall how a women once shared with me that when she was going through a particularly painful and disempowering time in her life, watching and rewatching Kill Bill Volume 1 & Volume 2 helped her unconsciously process the pain and anger she held in a completely safe way while she watched The Bride seek revenge. The Bride embodied the part of her that was rageful and vindictive and empowered in a way she herself would never act out in her real life. Watching the movies didn’t solve the painful circumstances in this woman’s life, but they did give her some small sense of camaraderie and peace when she connected to that empowered archetype deep inside of herself.

Much like how we can experience some sense of relief and clarity when someone else does a piece of work in a therapy group, I think that when we watch movies and TV shows, we consciously and unconsciously allow the characters to act out and process what we might need in our own lives in a way that’s safe, contained, and risk-free.

Calming & Containing.

One thing I hear from people – often couched in a way that makes it delivered like a guilty confession – is that they have a certain TV series or movie that they turn on at night to help them wind down and fall asleep. While some might argue that screen time before bed is a bad thing, I actually think it can be quite clever to use TV shows or movies to self-soothe as part of your bedtime hygiene routine.

Movies and TV shows that we’re deeply familiar with have the power to calm and contain us, particularly if they provide the essence of the very thing we’re most longing for in our own lives at the moment.

For instance, when our waking lives perhaps feel challenging or out of control, perhaps tuning into Downton Abbey might help us feel held and contained (literally by watching a show taking place within the walls of a house within a tight-knit family and their staff) or maybe re-watching an old series that deals with less rough stuff where the endings are predictive and always neatly tied up in bows – like I Love Lucy or Friends – soothes some part of you that needs happy endings and predictability, the very things you might be missing in your own life.

Whatever the movie or TV series is for you, if it calms and contains you and gives you some peace and a sense of the very thing you’re currently missing in your life right now, I think it’s could be a good and therapeutic idea to keep watching it.

Inquiries For You.

Now, of course, most of us probably default to watching Netflix/Amazon Prime/Hulu for entertainment purposes – which is great! – but if you’re curious and interested in using movies and TV more consciously as a tool for personal growth, I’ve drafted some inquiries for you below to deepen your self-awareness and to help make your next round of movie/TV watching more consciously therapeutic:

• What, historically, has been your relationship to TV and movie consumption? What role has this media played in your own life? Would you say your relationship to watching TV and movies feels largely positive or are there ways in which it doesn’t feel good?

• Growing up, did any shows have particular meaning and lessons for you? Are there shows that, when you watch them even today, you feel a sense of “coming home”?

• What qualities/characteristics/circumstances are you currently longing for in your own life right now? Peace? Romance? Community? Connection? Inspiration to be powerful? A boost of entrepreneurial can-do?

• Reviewing the list of those things you’re craving or longing for, what, off the top of your head, are some ideas of TV shows or movies that might be able to provide the essence of what you’re longing for? (hint: for more inspiration on generating this list, please check out the list of resources below to help you brainstorm!)

• What characters from TV and movies stand out to you as inspirational in your own life? Have their been characters who have deeply spoken to you before that you perhaps need to channel in your life more now?

• What would it be like if you asked yourself “What Would [insert character here] Do?” as a self-coaching inquiry the next time you’re faced with a challenge?
• Are there any characters out there who could safely give voice to parts of yourself that you’re longing to express but can’t or won’t in your waking life? Would watching something with them feel good to you right now?

Watching TV isn’t a guilty pleasure. Sometimes it’s exactly what your nervous system needs.

When you consciously select or watch certain shows as a way of calming, soothing, inspiring or encouraging yourself, I think this can be a perfectly legitimate personal growth tool and it can even be deeply therapeutic.

Of course, with all things in life, context is everything. If you find your time with movies and shows is getting in the way of your life and feeling unhealthy – interfering with your relationships and responsibilities – I encourage you to be curious about this and examine whether or not you need to scale back. And, of course, therapeutic use of TV shows and movies are no substitute for actually therapy. Movies and TV can be a good complement to professional therapeutic support, but in no way are they a substitute for care from a licensed mental health professional.

But if you, like so many of us, watch Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, etc, in a way that feels healthy and enjoyable but have felt maybe just a twinge of guilt about it, consider this blog post a big ol’ digital permission slip to stack up your queue – maybe with movies or shows that might weave in some of the above inquiries – and consciously enjoy the next time you partake in some therapeutic TV and movie watching.

Now I’d love to hear from you:

Leave me a message in the comments below and I’ll be sure to respond.

Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.

Warmly,

Annie

Resources

• TheCinematherapy.com Film Index
• AGoodMovieToWatch.com’s Mood Index
• Cinematherapy: The Girl’s Guide to Movies for Every Mood*
• Cinematherapy for the Soul: The Girl’s Guide to Finding Inspiration One Movie at a Time*
• The Motion Picture Prescription: Watch This Movie and Call Me in the Morning*

Frequently Asked Questions

You deserve a life that feels as good as it looks. Let’s work on that together.

References

• Rothschild, B. (2000). The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment. W. W. Norton & Company.
• Mar, R. A. (2011). The neural bases of social cognition and story comprehension. Annual Review of Psychology.
• Estés, C. P. (1992). Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. Ballantine Books.
• Zipes, J. (2002). The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World. Palgrave Macmillan.
• Horton, D., & Wohl, R. R. (1956). Mass communication and para-social interaction: Observations on intimacy at a distance. Psychiatry.
• Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology.
• Kardefelt-Winther, D. (2014). A conceptual and methodological critique of internet addiction research: Towards a model of compensatory internet use. Computers in Human Behavior.
• American Psychiatric Association (2013). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.). American Psychiatric Publishing.

What Neuroscience Actually Says About Entertainment and the Brain

The science of why stories comfort us is more interesting than most people realize. Stuart Brown, MD, founder of the National Institute for Play and author of Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul, has spent decades studying the biological function of play and narrative engagement. His research suggests that immersive story consumption activates many of the same neural pathways as actual play — including the limbic system’s capacity to process emotion in low-stakes environments.

When you watch a character navigate grief, betrayal, or fear, your brain doesn’t entirely distinguish between watching and experiencing. The same mirror neuron systems that allow you to feel empathy for people in front of you also fire in response to fictional characters you’ve come to know. You’re not passive. You’re practicing emotional processing in a contained environment where the consequences are manageable.

Nadia had been in trauma recovery for two years when she told me, somewhat sheepishly, that she’d watched the same episode of a particular drama six times. Each time, she cried at the same scene — a mother finally saying to her adult daughter: “I see how hard you’ve been working to carry this alone.”

“Is that weird?” Nadia asked.

It wasn’t weird. It was her nervous system using available tools. That scene was offering her something she hadn’t received in her own childhood — the experience of being witnessed. Each viewing gave her system another pass at metabolizing the grief of what had been missing. The show wasn’t a substitute for therapy. It was a supplement to it.

Why Driven Women Especially Benefit From Intentional Rest

There’s a particular quality of shame that driven, ambitious women carry around rest. If you’re not producing something, you’re wasting time. If you’re watching television, you’re avoiding something important. If you feel the need to decompress, something must be wrong with your stress tolerance.

This framing is not only inaccurate — it’s actively harmful. Matthew Walker, PhD, professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley and author of Why We Sleep, has written extensively about the role of downtime and non-productivity in cognitive restoration. The brain doesn’t consolidate learning, process emotional experience, or restore executive function during more working hours. It does those things during rest.

For many driven women I work with, television watching — when intentional rather than compulsive — serves as a scheduled transition between work and genuine rest. It provides what we might call “softer input”: narrative engagement that doesn’t demand active problem-solving, but doesn’t leave the mind in silence either. Silence, for women whose nervous systems have been chronically activated, can feel threatening rather than restorative.

Kira, a surgeon who worked sixty-hour weeks and carried clinical responsibility for dozens of patients daily, described her nightly thirty minutes of television this way: “It’s the only time I don’t have to make a decision. The story is happening to someone else. I just get to watch.” That’s not avoidance. That’s nervous system regulation — the kind that allows a person to show up sustainably the next day.

The key distinction is between compulsive watching (using entertainment to avoid feelings that need attention) and intentional watching (using entertainment as part of a genuine recovery routine). If you find that you’re watching to avoid going to bed, to numb anxious thoughts, or to escape feelings you know need tending — that’s worth exploring in therapy. But if you’re watching because it genuinely helps you decompress after an intense day, you don’t need to apologize for that. You need to do more of it — and with less guilt.

Making Your Media Choices Work For You

Not all television is equally therapeutic. This isn’t a moral judgment — it’s a practical one. High-stimulation content (rapid cuts, constant tension, thriller pacing) activates your nervous system rather than settling it. If you’re watching to decompress, content that keeps your threat-detection circuits running hot isn’t serving you.

What tends to work better for nervous system regulation: narrative content with emotional coherence (you can follow how the characters feel and why), moderate pacing, and stories that allow for some emotional resolution — even partial. Comfort rewatches work because your nervous system already knows the story is safe. You’re not waiting for the catastrophe. You can actually relax.

Some clients use specific shows the way others use weighted blankets or breathing exercises — as a reliable, predictable source of co-regulation. There’s nothing wrong with this. What matters is that it’s functioning within a broader self-care ecosystem that also includes sleep, movement, connection, and genuine emotional processing.

In my work with clients, I ask about their media choices the same way I ask about their food, sleep, and exercise. Not to judge them, but because the question often opens a window into what their nervous system is actually craving — and what it’s trying to avoid. “What are you watching lately?” turns out to be a surprisingly revealing clinical question.

The Mind at Rest Is Not the Mind Off-Duty: Default Mode Network and Deep Recovery

There’s a deeply held belief in driven culture that rest is simply what happens when work stops — a kind of neutral pause, a blank space between productive activities. Neuroscience has largely dismantled this idea, and yet it persists with remarkable tenacity in the internal monologue of most ambitious women I work with. What the research on the brain’s default mode network has made clear is that the mind at apparent rest is, in fact, extraordinarily active. The default mode network — a set of interconnected brain regions identified through fMRI research in the early 2000s, including work by Marcus Raichle, MD, neurologist and professor at Washington University School of Medicine — becomes highly engaged during periods of quiet, inward attention: daydreaming, narrative absorption, mind-wandering, and yes, following a story’s emotional arc on screen. Far from being idle, this network is where the brain consolidates memory, processes emotional experience, constructs personal meaning, works through unresolved problems that conscious attention hasn’t been able to crack, and rehearses social scenarios. Rest, in other words, isn’t absence of function. It’s a different and equally essential mode of function.

What I see consistently in my practice is that the driven women who are most depleted are often the ones who have no real access to this mode. Their downtime is filled with additional productivity; their evenings are optimized with self-improvement content; their mornings are engineered before the day has a chance to simply begin. When they finally sit down to watch something — a show they love, a film that pulls them in — they feel guilty, as though they’re stealing time from a more legitimate activity. But the guilt itself is neurologically costly in a way that compounds the depletion. Guilt keeps the threat-detection system engaged, which is precisely the system that needs to go sufficiently offline for genuine restoration to occur. You can’t enter the default mode network while simultaneously internally monitoring whether you’re allowed to be resting. The judgment short-circuits the recovery.

Oliver’s question is usually read as an invitation to ambition and meaningful action — but I think it’s asking something more subversive and more tender than it first appears. A wild and precious life includes fallow time. It includes the evenings where nothing externally productive gets accomplished except the slow restoration of a nervous system that has been giving everything it has for months without adequate replenishment. The driven woman who watches her favorite show without guilt, who lets her mind follow a story rather than a task list, who allows herself the absorption of genuine narrative engagement — she’s not wasting her one wild and precious life. She’s choosing, perhaps for the first time in a long while, to inhabit it rather than merely manage it. That’s a different kind of productivity, and it may be the one most urgently needed.

Clinically, I find that granting explicit permission for intentional, guilt-free rest is one of the most practically significant things I can offer a client who has arrived at my door running entirely on fumes. When a woman understands the neuroscience — that her brain requires unscheduled, unoptimized time the way her body requires sleep, and that this requirement isn’t a character flaw — she’s far more likely to protect that time without constant internal negotiation. The next section looks at how to make these choices more deliberately, so that your entertainment and downtime are actively working with your nervous system’s genuine needs rather than inadvertently working against them.

Both/And: Entertainment Can Be Both Avoidance and Medicine

In my work with clients, I find that the most important breakthroughs happen not when someone chooses one truth over another, but when they learn to hold two seemingly contradictory truths at the same time.

Reaching for a familiar show after a brutal week can be both a healthy nervous system reset and a sign that something harder deserves your attention. Both things can be true. The question isn’t whether you’re “using” TV — it’s what you’re using it for, and whether it’s one tool among many or the only tool you have.

Jordan came to therapy describing her nightly ritual: an episode of a comforting drama, the same cup of tea, her weighted blanket. She was slightly embarrassed about it. She’d read somewhere that screens before bed weren’t “ideal.” What we explored together was that this ritual was, in fact, beautifully intentional. She had built a container for decompression in a life with very few edges. The problem wasn’t the ritual — it was that she’d been shaming herself for needing one at all.

The both/and here is powerful: you can honor what works for you and remain curious about whether it’s working well enough. You can enjoy the relief television offers and ask yourself, honestly, what deeper relief might also be worth pursuing.

The Systemic Lens: Why Driven Women Need Different Recovery Than They’re Told

When we locate suffering exclusively in the individual — “Why can’t I just relax?” — we miss the larger forces at work. Driven, ambitious women operate in environments that are genuinely taxing in ways that standard “self-care” advice doesn’t account for.

The research on occupational stress makes this clear: high-stakes professional roles, sustained decision-making, and environments that require constant emotional regulation generate cortisol loads that the body was never designed to carry indefinitely. And in a culture that celebrates busyness as a virtue and frames rest as laziness, many ambitious women don’t have permission to recover — until their body makes the decision for them.

This matters because the driven women I work with almost universally blame themselves for pain that was never theirs alone to carry. The exhaustion, the need for numbing, the desperate reach for anything that quiets the noise — these aren’t failures of discipline. They’re proportionate responses to unsustainable demands.

Healing begins when you stop asking “What’s wrong with me that I need this?” and start asking “What does a person under this much pressure actually need — and am I giving it to them?”

If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.

The Path Forward: Turning Passive Escape Into Active Healing

In my work with clients, I’ve heard versions of the same confession: “I watch Netflix for three hours every night, and I’m embarrassed about it.” There’s often guilt layered in with the relief — a sense that this thing they’re reaching for to decompress is somehow evidence of weakness or avoidance. But what I want to offer here is a more nuanced read. The instinct toward narrative, toward story, toward watching characters navigate the emotional terrain you’re living through? That instinct isn’t pathological. It can actually be the beginning of something useful — if you learn how to work with it rather than just collapse into it.

The path forward isn’t about eliminating your Netflix habit. It’s about making your engagement with it more conscious. What are you watching, and why does it land with you? When a storyline hits something tender, what exactly is getting activated? That tightness in your chest during a scene about a daughter confronting her mother — is that recognition? Grief? Anger that never found an outlet? These moments of resonance are data. They’re your nervous system flagging something unresolved that wants attention. The goal is to use that information rather than let it dissolve back into the couch cushions when the credits roll.

One modality I often suggest for clients who are drawn to narrative and meaning-making is Narrative Therapy, developed by Michael White and David Epston. Narrative Therapy works from the premise that the stories we tell about ourselves shape our lived experience — and that we have more agency over those stories than we’ve been led to believe. When you notice that a particular storyline keeps pulling you in, a Narrative Therapy lens can help you ask: whose story is this reminding me of? What alternative story might be possible for my own life? It transforms passive consumption into active inquiry.

I also want to name the role of Somatic Experiencing in this work. Many clients who are using screen time heavily are doing so because their nervous system is chronically activated and needs a way to downshift. Somatic Experiencing, developed by Dr. Peter Levine, offers a body-based path to regulation that doesn’t require you to white-knuckle your way through stress or judge yourself for needing to decompress. It helps you build the capacity to tolerate more of your own inner experience — so that the three-hour Netflix session stops feeling like a necessity and starts feeling like an actual choice.

Practically, one experiment I sometimes offer clients is this: after you finish an episode or a film that moved you, take five minutes before you click “next.” Write down, or just sit with, what you felt. What memory or relationship did it bring up? What would it mean to bring that feeling into a conversation — with a therapist, a partner, a trusted friend? You’re not required to do anything with it. Just don’t let the feeling stay unconscious. The goal is to widen the bandwidth between “felt something” and “moving on.”

For driven women with full lives, there’s also an important structural piece here. If Netflix is primarily filling the hours after a depleting day when there’s nothing left in the tank, that’s useful information about sustainable workload and self-care. It’s worth asking: what would need to shift for evenings to feel less like survival and more like genuine restoration? That’s a question worth bringing to executive coaching or to therapy, because the answer often lives in the architecture of your life, not just your mindset.

You don’t have to earn rest. And you don’t have to be ashamed of the ways you’ve been coping. But there’s a version of your relationship with story and narrative that’s more alive, more connected to your actual inner world, and more useful for the healing you’re likely here to do. If you’re curious what that could look like with real support, I’d invite you to learn more about working with me. The stories that keep pulling you in are often the ones that most deserve your attention — just not from behind a screen alone.

Medical Disclaimer