Hyderabad: Sitting at home for days, not being together and the fear of getting sick are serious worries. When the lockdown began, several people were trapped in their home for months, with nothing but their phones or laptop for entertainment. And so the pandemic saw a rapid increase in the phenomenon of binge-watching – watching multiple consecutive episodes of a TV show in one sitting.
While binge-watching did provide a distraction from the quarantine blues, it was also the next growth wave for OTT companies. In fact, according to the BARC-Nielsen report, published in April 2020, the time spent on smartphones, the main device for consuming online content in India, spent up to almost three hours a week in the second week of Covid-19 disruption.
But the scenarios also presented people with mental health issues. Many psychologists have called this a negative coping strategy, arguing that ‘binge watching’ is a “rescue” from anxiety to divert our attention from what is going on in real life. While it may make you feel good and your anxiety may subside for a while, the satisfaction is only until the episodes are up.
Source: Telangana Today