There is no NHS service and no clinical guidance for this, which is worth knowing before you go looking. What does exist: a GP who can treat what sits underneath, and one fellowship that names it directly.
Eight retention features you can spot in the services you already pay for, from the countdown over the credits to the season released all at once. Naming them will not disarm them, but it changes what you are arguing with.
Today is already spent, so protect tonight instead. Get up at your normal time, get outside, eat properly, and go to bed at your usual hour rather than a heroic one.
Name the feeling in the ten seconds before you press play. Two weeks of one-word notes will tell you more about your evenings than any rule about episodes.
Be prepared for this to be thin. There is no NHS service for compulsive watching, no NICE guidance on it, and no diagnosis for a clinician to work from. What does exist is a GP who can treat the sleep and the mood underneath it, one fellowship that names television directly, and a free CBT-based peer programme. That is the honest list.
Not because nobody cares. Because there is nothing formal to build a service around.
Problematic binge-watching "remains ill-defined and conceptualized" in the research literature, with disagreement about whether it is best understood as an addictive behaviour or as a way of managing difficult feelings. It appears in no diagnostic manual. The American Psychiatric Association is explicit that "gambling disorder is the only behavioral addiction (as opposed to chemical substance use disorders) identified in DSM-5-TR", and the one proposed research condition in this area "is limited to gaming and does not include problems with general use of the internet, online gambling, or use of social media or smartphones".
NHS services follow diagnoses and clinical guidelines. With neither in place, there is no commissioned service, no referral pathway and no waiting list to join. Anyone offering you specialist treatment for television addiction is operating well ahead of the evidence, and you should ask what exactly they are treating.
That is a frustrating thing to read when you have come here at one in the morning. It is also better than being sent somewhere that cannot help.
Quite a lot, if you lead with the right thing.
Do not open with "I think I'm addicted to Netflix", because there is nothing for them to do with that sentence. Open with the effects, which are things the NHS treats routinely.
**Sleep.** This is the strongest card and the one with real evidence attached. NHS guidance says to see a GP if changing your sleeping habits has not helped, if you have had trouble sleeping for months, or if it is "affecting your daily life in a way that makes it hard for you to cope". Insomnia has real treatment pathways, including talking therapies.
**Mood.** If the watching is what gets you through the evening, and evenings are the hard part, that is worth saying out loud. Low mood, anxiety and grief are treated, and they are frequently what late nights are sitting on top of.
**Anything else running alongside it.** Drinking that has crept up, a work situation, a bereavement. GPs ask about these not to catch you out but because they are the things they can act on.
A useful opening sentence: **"My sleep has been wrecked for months, I'm watching until three or four most nights, and I can't seem to stop. I'm struggling in the mornings."** Facts, effects, no label.
You can self-refer to NHS talking therapies in England without going through a GP at all, which is worth knowing if you would rather not have the conversation.
**Internet and Technology Addicts Anonymous** is the one that names this directly. It lists "video addiction, television addiction" among the behaviours it covers, alongside social media, gaming and general internet use. Meetings are free and online, and it has in-person groups in several UK cities. It is a twelve-step fellowship rather than treatment, and its beliefs belong to it rather than to medicine. Plenty of people take the meetings and quietly leave the framework, which is an entirely normal way to use a fellowship.
**SMART Recovery UK** is free, secular and CBT-based, run by trained facilitators rather than sponsors, and it "supports a wide range of behavioural challenges, including gambling, food-related issues, shopping, gaming, and other compulsive behaviours". Streaming is not named on that list. It sits inside "other compulsive behaviours", which means a meeting is worth trying and you should not arrive expecting a room full of people with your specific problem. Their line is **0330 053 6022**.
**Private therapy.** A CBT therapist can work on this without needing a diagnosis, because the material is ordinary: sleep, avoidance, evening routines, whatever the watching is managing. If you go private, look for BACP or BABCP registration and be wary of anyone marketing a specialist screen addiction programme, since there is no evidence base for one to be built on.
Most of the useful work here does not need a service, which is the compensation for there not being one.
Some people find it useful to keep the friction, the difficult hours and a person who knows in one place, which is what [Renovyn's Shield](/shield) does. It is a delay with somebody in the loop. It is not treatment, and given there is no treatment for this, it is not standing in for one either.
The late nights are sometimes carrying something much heavier than a viewing habit, and that part does have services.
**Samaritans** is **116 123**, free, twenty four hours a day. **NHS urgent mental health support** is **111**, option 2. If someone is in immediate danger, 999.
Neither will ask you about episode counts.
**Is there NHS treatment for binge-watching?** No. There is no NHS service and no NICE guidance for compulsive watching, because there is no agreed diagnosis to commission a service around. A GP can treat the sleep, the mood and anything else underneath it, which is often where the useful work is.
**Are there support groups for TV or streaming addiction?** Internet and Technology Addicts Anonymous names television and video addiction among the behaviours it covers, with free online meetings and UK in-person groups. SMART Recovery UK is free and CBT-based and covers compulsive behaviours generally, without naming streaming.
**What do I say to my GP?** Lead with sleep and mood rather than with a label. Say how many nights, for how long, and what it is costing you in the mornings. Those are the things they can act on.
**Can a therapist help without a diagnosis?** Yes. CBT works on the actual material here, which is sleep, avoidance and evening routine, and none of that requires a diagnostic label. Be cautious about anyone selling a specialist screen addiction programme, since there is no evidence base for one.
**Is compulsive watching a real condition?** It is not recognised in any diagnostic manual, and researchers have not agreed what it is. That does not mean your experience is not real. It means the label is unavailable, and the cost to your sleep and your evenings is the thing worth measuring instead.
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