There are about four thousand things on Netflix I have never seen.
Last night I watched an episode of a show I have now seen eleven times.
Not a new one. Not even a new episode of the old one. The same episode I put on when I can't be bothered to be a person. I know the lines. I know the bit where the music comes in. I know exactly what happens, which by any normal measure should make it the most boring option available...
Here's what took me years to work out. A brain that's allergic to boredom and a brain that reaches for the same thing over and over are the same brain. Novelty-seeking was never about wanting things to be different. It's about wanting stimulation that's reliable. Something new might be brilliant or it might be nothing. Something you already know pays out every single time.
That's not a contradiction. That's a brain doing maths.
Why does a brain that can't stand boredom love repetition?
Because familiarity and novelty are doing two completely different jobs, and we've spent years treating them like they're in a fight.
Start with what happens in your head when you hear a song you love. In 2011, researchers at McGill University in Montreal, led by Valorie Salimpoor in Robert Zatorre's lab, published a study in Nature Neuroscience that people are still unpacking. Dopamine wasn't just released at the peak moment of the music. It was released before it, in a different part of the brain entirely. The caudate lit up in anticipation of the good bit. The nucleus accumbens lit up during it.
Sit with that for a second, because it's the whole article.
You cannot anticipate something you've never heard. The first time through a song, there is no build. There's no leaning forward. You don't know the drop is coming, so you can't wait for it. Which means a familiar song isn't a weaker version of a new one.
It's a scheduled one.
You know precisely when it arrives. You get the run-up and the landing. And if your reward system is stingy and inconsistent, which is a fair description of running an ADHD brain, a guaranteed hit at a known time is worth far more than a maybe.
None of this is unique to us. A 2019 survey of "extreme re-listening" in Psychology of Music put the average play count of a person's current favourite song north of three hundred. Everyone loops.
The difference is what we're using it for.
The reason silence is worse than noise
There's a second strand of research here and it's the one that made me go quiet when I read it.
In 2007, Göran Söderlund and Sverker Sikström at Lund University in Sweden published a study in the Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry testing what background white noise did to cognitive performance. In children with ADHD, the noise improved performance. In the children without ADHD, the same noise made it worse.
Same room. Same sound. Opposite result.
Out of that came the moderate brain arousal model, and the short version is this: how much background stimulation a brain needs to work well depends on its dopamine levels, and a brain running low on dopamine needs more input, not less, to get to the same place. A 2024 meta-analysis led by Joel Nigg pooled thirteen studies and found the pattern held.
So when someone tells you to turn it off so you can concentrate, they aren't being unreasonable. They're being accurate about themselves. For them, silence is a clear desk. For you, silence is an empty tank.
Now, honesty time, because I'm not going to sell you a tidy story.
It doesn't work for everyone. A 2024 follow-up from Söderlund's group, looking at forty-three young people with ADHD, found roughly a third performed worse with noise. The ones who benefited leaned inattentive. The ones who struggled leaned hyperactive and impulsive. So if background sound has always felt like being sandpapered, you're not doing ADHD wrong. You're on the other side of the line, and you need to turn the volume down rather than up.
The loop isn't entertainment. It's a tool.
You are not listening to that album. You're using it.
Think about when the loop turns up. It's almost never when you're relaxed and giving something your full attention. It's when you're trying to start a task you've been avoiding for nine days. It's on the walk home when your head is too loud. It's at 1am when your brain has decided tonight's entertainment is a conversation from 2011.
The loop shows up when you need managing.
Which makes it a nervous system tool. Free, portable, instant, no prescription, no eighteen month waiting list. You have been quietly regulating yourself with a three minute pop song and filing it under "embarrassing personal habit."
It's not a f*cking quirk. It's a coping mechanism that works.
There's a wrinkle in the research that backs this up from an unexpected direction. A 2025 study in Frontiers in Psychology looked at 434 young adults and found, as you'd expect, that the ADHD group listened to significantly more background music while studying than everyone else. But it also found something that sounds like it contradicts everything I've just said: during genuinely demanding tasks, the ADHD group showed a lower preference for familiar music than the neurotypical group did.
Which threw me, until it clicked.
Familiarity and stimulation are two tools for two different jobs. When you need to regulate, you want the known thing, because known asks nothing of you. When you need to perform, you want the stimulating thing, because you need arousal, and a song you've heard four hundred times has stopped delivering any.
You're not being random. You're reaching for a different tool.
Why you rewatch the same show when there are four thousand you haven't seen
Because a show you've already seen asks nothing of you.
No plot to track. No new faces to file. No tension, because you already know he doesn't die. No decision about whether you even like it, because you settled that four rewatches ago.
A new show is work. It wants the exact resources you've run out of: working memory to hold the threads together, attention to catch what matters, and the patience to sit in not-knowing for six episodes before it pays off. On a day when you have nothing left, that isn't relaxation. That's a second job with better lighting.
The rewatch is a room with no doors you haven't opened.
And there's a second thing nobody mentions. Choosing the new thing is itself the hardest part. You've spent forty minutes scrolling and gone to bed having watched nothing at all. The rewatch skips the choosing completely. It isn't that you love that show more than every other show on earth. It's that pressing play costs you zero executive function, and everything else costs more than you've got.
The same lunch, eight months running
Now the same mechanism, in the least glamorous place it shows up.
I've written before about how feeding yourself with ADHD is a full time job, and the usual explanation for eating the identical meal for months is executive function relief, or texture, or sensory stuff. All of that is real.
But there's newer research that reframes it, and I haven't seen anyone in the UK write about it yet.
In 2025, a team led by Yasmin Bayoumi at Berkeley published a study in the journal Autism looking at 961 adults. Not just autistic adults. They deliberately separated out 416 adults with ADHD and no autism diagnosis, and measured eating difficulties across all of them.
Here's the bit that stopped me. When they worked out which single factor best predicted those eating difficulties, it wasn't sensory sensitivity. It was insistence on sameness.
Sameness. Not texture. Not taste. Not smell.
The strongest predictor of ADHD adults struggling with food was the pull towards the thing that stays the same.
Which means the safe meal was never really about the meal. It's the same instinct as the rewatch and the album on repeat, wearing an apron. Your brain conserving itself by removing one more unknown from the day.
What happens when a loop burns out
Here's the part I have genuinely never seen written down anywhere, and it's the reason I wanted to write this at all.
Sometimes a loop dies.
The song that reliably got you out of the door every morning for four months... you put it on and nothing happens. It's just noise now. The show stops working. The safe meal suddenly tastes wrong and you cannot explain why, and now you can't eat it, possibly ever again.
And you feel completely, disproportionately gutted.
Then someone clocks your face and says "it's just a sandwich."
No.
It was a tool. One of maybe five things that reliably worked on your nervous system, and it has just broken, and there is no shop that sells another one. You have to find the next one by accident, and you have no idea how long that takes. In the meantime you're a little more dysregulated every day, and nobody around you can see a single reason why.
That's a real loss. Tiny, ridiculous, invisible to everyone else. It's also super annoying, and you're allowed to be annoyed about it.
Novelty and sameness were never opposites
Right. Philosophy bit. Stay with me, because this is the part that reorganised my head.
We keep framing this as a contradiction. Novelty-seeker who loves sameness. Chaos gremlin with a comfort blanket. Two opposing forces, and surely one is the real you and the other a malfunction.
But look at what they're actually doing.
Novelty raises your stimulation. Repetition holds it steady. They're not enemies. They're two settings on one dial. One is the hunt. One is the return. You need both, and a brain that only knows how to hunt doesn't end up interesting. It ends up on the floor.
Novelty is how you get lit up. Repetition is how you stay lit without burning down. You're not two people. You're one system with a throttle.
This is the yin and yang thing, and I don't mean it in a fridge magnet way. The actual idea, the one underneath the symbol everyone's got on a tote bag, is that opposites aren't separate things at war. They're two halves of one movement, and each turns into the other if you push it far enough.
Which is exactly what happens here. Push novelty far enough and it becomes its own grinding sameness: every day different, nothing to stand on, and eventually you can't feel any of it. Push repetition far enough and it becomes its own chaos: stuck, stale, walls closing in.
Neither one is the good half. The balance is the good half.
Your boredom is a signal that stimulation has dropped too low. Your pull towards the loop is a signal it's gone too high, or that you've run the tank dry. Two ends of one dial, both of them your nervous system telling you what it needs in the only language it has.
The loop is your yin. It's the return. And you've spent your whole life apologising for the half of yourself that keeps you standing.
So what do you actually do with this?
I'm not handing you a five step system. You'd read it, agree with it, and never do it. We both know that.
Three things worth sitting with instead.
One. Stop apologising for it. When someone says "how can you watch that again," you don't owe them a defence. Most people have never needed a tool to get themselves through a door. You have. That's the entire difference, and it isn't a character flaw. Worth noting too: NHS England data shows up to 735,000 open ADHD referrals in England as of the end of 2025, and not one line of the official NHS symptom list mentions any of what you've just read.
Two. Notice what job each loop is doing. Some loops start you. Some shut you down. Some carry you through a transition, which is where a lot of us come apart. They aren't interchangeable, and once you know which is which, you can reach for the right one on purpose instead of scrolling around hoping something lands.
Three. Don't burn your best ones on ordinary days. If an album reliably gets you into hard work, playing it while you do the washing up wears the edge off it faster. Rotate them. Keep two or three in cold storage. Treat them like the limited resource they actually are.
And let other people have theirs. Your partner on their ninth run through the same six episodes isn't being boring. They're doing what you do, in a format you happen not to need.
The bit I want you to take away
For most of my life I read my own repetition as evidence that something was wrong with me. Proof that underneath all the ideas and the enthusiasm and the seventeen half-finished projects, I was actually a bit limited. Narrow. Stuck.
It's the opposite.
The loop is the reason the rest of it is possible. It's the ground you push off from. A brain that runs this hot needs somewhere cool to stand, and you built yourself one out of a song, a sandwich, and an episode you've seen eleven times.
That isn't a malfunction.
That's engineering.
FAQ
Why do people with ADHD watch the same show over and over?
Because a familiar show removes almost every demand a new one makes: no plot to hold in working memory, no uncertainty to tolerate, and no decision about what to watch, which is often the hardest part of the evening. A rewatch delivers comfort and background stimulation at close to zero executive function cost, which is why it shows up on the days you have least left.
Is needing things to stay the same a sign of autism rather than ADHD?
Insistence on sameness is classically associated with autism, but the 2025 study in Autism above measured it in 416 adults with ADHD and no autism diagnosis, and found it was the strongest predictor of their eating difficulties. So it's genuinely present in ADHD alone. That said, the two co-occur often, and if this piece landed harder than you expected, that's worth raising with a clinician rather than diagnosing from a blog.
Should I try to stop looping the same things?
Only if a specific loop is actively costing you something you care about. Repetition isn't a problem to be solved. It's a regulation strategy that works, it's free, and you found it without anyone teaching you. The more useful move is to get deliberate: work out which loop does which job, and stop spending your best ones on tasks that didn't need them.
Curious what kind of chaotic you are? Take the quiz.
