Just one more

It's half past nine. The kitchen's done, the children are down, and you've got an hour before bed. You put on the drama, the one with the body in the lake, and you've said, to yourself or to the person beside you, one episode. It's good. At quarter past ten the detective opens a door and sees something and the screen goes black, and the credits start, and in the bottom corner a small box says the next episode will play in five, four, three.

You don't stop it. You didn't decide not to stop it either. The countdown reached nothing and the next one started, and you were still on the sofa, and by the time you'd thought about it the new episode was two minutes in and the thing behind the door had been explained and there was a new thing. At eleven the same. At twenty to midnight the third one ends and you switch it off, because it's twenty to midnight, and you go up, and you lie there with the lake in your head, and the alarm is at seven.

Tomorrow you're tired. Not ruined, just flat, and short with someone at work, and you say you'll stop at one tonight. At half past nine you put it on. One episode.

These are invented, but I'd guess yours is close. Some words. I'll use autoplay for the feature, because that's what it's called. The countdown is the timer in the corner. The next one is the episode that starts itself. The cliff is the ending built to make you want it. The plan is how many you meant to watch, which is usually one. The overrun is the episodes beyond the plan. The credits are the natural stopping point at the end of an episode, which autoplay removes. The stop is a deliberate end, which you'll make in chapter 21. The end time is the hour the evening finishes, which chapter 22 sets. A chosen binge is several episodes decided in advance as an occasion, which is allowed and is chapter 24. And the arousal is the researchers' word for a mind that's still running at bedtime, which chapter 7 is about.

Before you go on, do one thing. For a week, keep a list. Each night, how many episodes you planned, how many you watched, what time the screen went off, and one word for how the morning felt. Don't change anything. Most people who do this find the planned column says one or two all week, the watched column says three, and the morning column has the same word down it.