Comfort Media

My sister and I both have something that not everyone does. We have comfort rewatches/rereads.

It wasn't until adulthood and conversations with my boyfriend that I realized not everyone returns to familiar media as a way to find comfort, and it was a fascinating revelation.

According to Dr. Jennifer V. Fayard for Psychology Today, people return to this media to reduce their cognitive load, to restore feelings of self-control, and to easier process information and therefore feel positive emotions. (2021).

All of this makes perfect sense to me. My sister and I both deal with anxiety, and it's helpful to have something familiar that doesn't take up too much of our brainpower to experience.

For example, I shared a post with my siblings about the show Liberty's Kids that we'd loved growing up (it's been 22 years since the show premiered, which doesn't make sense in my head).

My sister said that she'd just pulled out the DVD that she'd found in the $5 bin and was planning on a rewatch. I laughed because there is a long list of movies and TV shows that we both will rewatch at random.

When we want a laugh at ridiculousness, we watch a random Tyler Perry movie or play. When we want the nostalgia of theatre, we'll watch Hamilton.

After much searching, I bought the box sets for every season of Walker, Texas Ranger, and watched them straight through.

And of course, I have the extended editions of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I've slacked off in recent years, but I used to watch them once a year. I can almost quote them for you word for word, and they're my favorite movies.

Streaming has helped my rewatching tendencies since I can find almost any movie or TV show that I randomly want to see. The amount of times I've rewatched most of the Marvel movies is a little much, I'll admit.

My ultimate favorite rewatches are Studio Ghibli films such as Spirited Away or my absolute favorite, Howl's Moving Castle. In fact, my boyfriend took me to see a couple of these in theatres during the Ghibli Festival and I couldn't have been happier.

But it's not just movies and TV shows that are familiar things to return to.

I'm in the middle of a replay of the Assassin's Creed games that I own; admittedly, it's not all of them, but I enjoy replaying the stories and missions and trying to get 100% completion. Almost all of the single-player games that I own have been played multiple times, and I enjoy every replay.

A random comfort thing that I have is karaoke songs. I'll get a wild hair and decide that I want to stretch my voice out. I have a roster of songs that I return to; sometimes Broadway, sometimes pop, sometimes jazz standards. YouTube has them in a playlist for me, so I don't even have to search. Even in this, the familiarity of the songs, knowing the lyrics without having to look at the screen and what notes to sing brings me comfort. I can sing while I do other tasks, which serves the same purpose as turning on the TV in the background.

My favorite thing to revisit, however, is books. Books are already the things that tend to give me the most comfort, so rereading them is like a double dose. Part of my love of libraries - and collecting my own books - is out of a desire for the comfort of rereading familiar stories.

The Redwall series was one of my favorites from when I was a kid, and last year I finally purchased the few that I was missing and reread the entire series. My childhood copies of a Sherlock Holmes collection and The Count of Monte Cristo are a couple of my favorites and are proudly displayed beside newer discoveries from authors like Evan Winter and Tomi Adeyemi.

In recent years, I've branched out to watch, read, and listen to new things. I've watched a couple of new anime (I watched one where the characters cooked the monsters that they defeated), new movies, and even downloaded a few new albums to listen to. I've branched out so much in my reading, taking suggestions from my friends and social media and discovering new stories to fall in love with. I even had to buy a new bookshelf, which only excited me because it gets me closer to having a full personal library like I've always wanted.

As my life has gotten less stressful, I've found it easier to branch out and enjoy new things. But it's nice to know that my comfort media is still there for me when I need it.

Source: Fayard, Jennifer.“Why Rewatching TV Shows Feels So Good.” *Psychology Today*, Sussex Publishers, LLC, 16 June 2021, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/people-are-strange/202106/why-rewatching-tv-shows-feels-so-good.