A confession: I grew up without television. I was not off the grid but in a perfectly ordinary leafy Midwestern suburb in the 1960s, with five siblings and parents who “didn’t believe in TV,” the way other people don’t believe in astrology or extended warranties. We were raised on books, DC comics, and Mad Magazine, amd consequently alienated from everything our classmates talked about on Monday mornings.
We did sneak our fix—afternoons at my grandparents’ house watching Bonanza and Bewitched, or football games flickering in friends’ basements. But the household belief was clear: Television rots the mind.
Flash forward a few decades. I am now a psychiatrist with a fully internet-wired home and favorite series on BritBox, Criterion, and Netflix. And it turns out—with apologies to Dad—that some of the most useful concepts I’ve encountered in clinical psychiatry have arrived not from peer-reviewed journals but from the writers’ rooms of Seinfeld, The IT Crowd, and Harold Ramis’s masterpiece Groundhog Day. Here are four lessons I return to again and again with patients.
Lesson One: Do the Opposite
In a famous 1994 Seinfeld episode, George Costanza reaches a moment of painful self-awareness. Sitting in a diner, he announces: “Every decision I’ve ever made, in my entire life, has been wrong. My life is the opposite of everything I want it to be.”
Jerry’s reply is swift: “If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right!”
George orders chicken salad instead of tuna. He approaches a woman he’d normally avoid, tells her with disarming honesty that he’s unemployed and lives with his parents. She is charmed. He gets a job with the Yankees. His life, briefly, becomes magnificent.
This is comedy. But it maps well onto what happens in the brain during depression. Neuroscientists have established that depression is associated with overactivity in the Default Mode Network—brain regions involved in rumination and mental time travel into past regrets and future catastrophes. When the DMN runs hot, it keeps generating the same loops: I always fail. It will never work. I can’t. These are not character flaws. They are traffic jams in particular neural circuits.
The behavioral residue is what clinicians call “harm avoidance”: Even after depression lifts, people keep avoiding normal, low-risk situations. George’s insight captures something genuinely therapeutic: When your instincts are reliably steering you wrong, one of the most radical acts available is to notice the impulse and deliberately do the opposite. Behavioral Activation therapy operates on exactly this principle—not through grand transformations, but small concrete acts: Go to the event you’d skip, make the call you’d avoid, order the chicken salad.
Lesson Two: Brooklyn Is Not Expanding
Annie Hall opens with young Alvy Singer in his Brooklyn doctor’s office, refusing to do his homework. He has read that the universe is expanding—and if everything will eventually fly apart, what’s the point of long division?
His mother is unsympathetic. The psychiatrist adds: “It won’t be expanding for billions of years, Alvy, and we’ve got to enjoy ourselves while we’re here.”
Depression and anxiety pull the camera back until everything feels cosmically pointless—the ultimate cognitive distortion, in which dinner plans and calling your mother become absurdly small against the backdrop of existential enormity. The therapeutic move is to zoom back in: You are here in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is not expanding. The next five minutes exist. They’re workable. Start there.
This isn’t a dismissal of genuine existential pain but a scale adjustment—countering the mind’s tendency, when depressed or anxious, to operate at a resolution so vast that no ordinary human action seems worth taking.
Lesson Three: Have You Tried Turning It Off and On Again?
Roy Trenneman, the deadpan IT technician of The IT Crowd, keeps a tape recorder by his desk which he rewinds every time the phone rings: “Hello, IT. Have you tried turning it off and on again?”
It is a joke about the mundane miracle of the reboot. In psychiatry, we encounter the analog constantly. Habits are difficult to change not because people lack willpower but because they’ve become embedded in neural circuitry—grooves worn by repetition. Sleep deprivation, chronic stress, depression, and substance use all corrupt these circuits. Sometimes the most useful intervention really is a systematic reboot: a period of rest, a change in environment, a behavioral pattern interrupted long enough for something new to take hold.
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There’s a reason exercise, sleep hygiene, and changing your daily routine can have measurable effects on mood: They interrupt circuits that have been running the same program on a loop.
Lesson Four (and the Greatest): Groundhog Day
Groundhog Day (1993) is the most psychologically sophisticated work in the popular canon. Phil Connors, an arrogant Pittsburgh weatherman, is condemned to relive February 2 in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania indefinitely. He cycles through denial, hedonism, and despair before arriving—slowly, over thousands of iterations—at genuine transformation. He learns piano. He memorizes the lives of townspeople he once despised. He becomes, reluctantly and then wholeheartedly, good.
The film dramatizes the central problem of human change. What psychoanalysts called the “repetition compulsion”—the tendency to recreate painful patterns—has its correlate in the neuroscience of habit formation: Behaviors deeply grooved into our circuitry run automatically, below the level of conscious intention. Phil is trapped in a literal loop, but most of us live in figurative ones. The film’s implicit therapy is not insight but action—repeated, varied, persistent action—until new grooves are worn in, and the person waking up is, inexplicably, someone better than before.
The brain is more plastic than we once believed. But plasticity is not passivity. The circuits can change if we do things differently—again and again and again.
Maps in the Medium
My father had a point about television’s deleterious effects. Yet I’ve found in sitcoms and films a set of maps I return to with patients: Do the opposite; zoom back in to Brooklyn; reboot the system; and if you’re stuck in a loop, trust that the loop, repeated with intention, might eventually lead somewhere new.
Not bad for a medium that was supposed to rot the mind.