We Watched Friends Through Everything
YOUR NERVOUS SYSTEM REMEMBERS THE STORY — 1 OF 5
There is a particular kind of chaos that doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t arrive with sirens or a formal diagnosis. It just settles in — between the arguments and the reconciliations, between the uncertainty and the attempts at certainty — and suddenly you are two people trying to build something together in conditions that make building very difficult.
That was the early years of our relationship - which I outline in much more depth in my book Marinating In Chaos.
It was becoming clear to me that there were a lot of secrets, but I still couldn’t pinpoint what was going on. I was trying to decide to stay another year, and trust that it seems like this relationship has the substance it seems but has yet to fully demonstrate? What’s with having 3 cell phones? Odd, he won’t accept me as a friend on Facebook, no? But then there were solid signs - bringing me to all his conferences, introducing me to all his medical friends, his family, invitation to move in together…
And no matter what was going on — no matter how unresolved or tender or exhausting the day had been — we would come together at the end of it and watch Friends.
Not a new show. Not something that required us to pay attention to plot. Friends. Honestly we were so different you could count on both hands things we could agree on in terms of pop culture. It was a common denominator of sorts. We’ve probably watched the whole series 10x at this point. The comedic timing, the jokes arriving exactly where we knew they would, the same theme song at the start of every episode playing like a small promise: this, at least, is going to go the way you remember.
We moved between Friends and The Big Bang Theory with a fluency that didn’t require discussion. We just knew. And when our son was born, it followed us into the delivery room.
When I started going into labour, I read Birthing From Within and knew there was no hurry to get to the hospital - I had a doctor in the house - oh wait, he was so chill about it - he still went to work that afternoon! Comfort in his medical opinion and personal experience delivering 500+ babies in his residency. So I ordered Sushi, bounced on my yoga ball, and watched friends as the waves of contractions started winding up.
Later, we played the Friends theme song when we were trying to get our first to sleep. And at some point, one of us noticed that it was working — that the baby seemed to respond to it. Whether the nervous system of a very small person can be soothed by a sitcom theme song is not something I can prove. But I believe it. He literally heard it every night we were falling asleep while I was pregnant. The comfort was transmitted.
What Your Nervous System Is Actually Doing
Here is what I have come to understand, through years of working in nervous system regulation and through my own lived experience of reaching for the same shows in hard times: comfort television is not a distraction from your emotional state. It is a response to it.
Your nervous system — which tracks safety and threat before your conscious mind has a chance to weigh in — is doing something very specific when you return to a familiar show. It is predicting.
Not at the level of “I remember this episode” (though you might). At a deeper level. The level of: I know the shape of this story. I know it resolves. I know the characters make it through. I know where we are going, even if I can’t articulate the route.
That prediction is not passive. It is the nervous system using pattern recognition to create a regulated state. There is enough tension to stay engaged — the will-they-won’t-they, the misunderstanding, the almost — but the resolution is already encoded. Your system knows. And that knowing creates something that is increasingly rare in modern life: safety inside a story.
You are not tuning out. You are tuning back in — to your body, to your baseline, to the part of you that existed before whatever this week brought.
Why Repetition Is the Point
We tend to treat repetition in our media consumption as a vaguely embarrassing habit. Rewatching things you’ve seen before feels like it should come with a small asterisk, a qualifier — “I know, I’ve already seen it, but...”
I want to retire that asterisk.
Repetition in storytelling is not a failure of curiosity. It is a feature of a nervous system that knows what it needs. Familiarity is the mechanism. The more your system knows a story, the more efficiently it can move through the arc — gathering the regulation without spending resources on threat assessment.
The first time you watch something, part of your brain is genuinely alert to outcome uncertainty. The tension is real tension. The second time, the third time, the fiftieth time — your system moves through the same architecture with increasing ease, like a body that has learned a route and no longer needs to think about the turns.
What looks like comfort watching is nervous system practice. You are, each time, rehearsing the experience of: things get hard, and then they resolve.
In times of chaos — real chaos, the kind that doesn’t have a guaranteed ending written into the genre — that rehearsal matters more than it might seem.
This essay is part of the series Your Nervous System Remembers the Story — a deep dive into why humans are wired for narrative, why formula is a feature not a flaw, and what your comfort reads and comfort watches are actually doing for your nervous system.
Next: Essay 2, July 9 — The Formula Is the Point: on Love Is Blind, procedural dramas, and why predictable storytelling is some of the most sophisticated emotional technology we have.
If this resonated, forward it to someone who apologies for rewatching the same show. They deserve to feel good about it.