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Prepare yourselves: Netflix will release House of Cards Season 2 on Valentine's Day. For fans of the first season, this means a sense of excitement mingled with foreboding — because of course, Netflix will release all 13 hour-long episodes at once. Subscribers will have to make a decision soon: do they blow the whole weekend of Feb. 15 to 16 on the show, or do they risk the slings and arrows of outrageous spoilers?
It's surprising how fast we have entered into a world where binge viewing of an entire season is not only the norm, it is encouraged. It's encouraged by Netflix and Hulu Plus, both of which offer versions of their apps (on the web, on the iPad and on Roku, at least) that auto-play the next episode as soon as you get to the credits for the last one. (Netflix calls the feature Post Play.)
See also: Embrace the Binge: Netflix Viewers Average 2.3 Episodes per Sitting
It's as if a restaurant were to serve you another slice of chocolate cake the second you were done with dessert — kind of a nice bonus, but not really the healthiest thing for your customers.
The real fault lies with us, of course. It's odd, when you think about it, that the word "binge" has become socially acceptable in the context of streaming television. If a friend came into work on Monday and said they'd spent the entire weekend binge drinking, or binge eating, we'd probably advise them to seek therapy or a twelve-step program.
But if they came in and said they'd binge-watched an entire season of Scandal on Netflix, we'd be expected to laugh, maybe even congratulate them, and trade opinions on Olivia Pope's outfits.
Granted, binge viewing doesn't have the obvious ill-effects of binge drinking or binge eating. But it is harmful to your health, unless you're watching all those episodes back to back on a treadmill (and we somehow doubt you are).
Five recent health studies that looked at the effects of sitting and standing came to the chilling conclusion that sitting for just two hours cuts your life expectancy by a couple of years. (Two hours wouldn't even be defined as binge watching.) Sitting too much has been linked to high cholesterol, obesity, diabetes, even cancer.
Tell me again why it's cool to watch so much Breaking Bad in one sitting?
See also: 9 Netflix Original Series to Stream in 2014
Sure, I've binge-watched in my time, usually when I felt the social pressure to catch up to what the rest of the world was watching (there's nothing worse than being behind on Game of Thrones; you can barely look at Twitter), or when I've been pressured by my friends or (sorry, dear) my spouse.
But it always produced a slight sickly feeling, a sense of satiety and waste. Not to mention withdrawal symptoms.
There's a reason why that Portlandia sketch about the couple binge-watching Battlestar Galactica hit home — we may not have lost our jobs and our minds to an overly addictive TV show, but many of us know that sense of being so immersed in a show that any interruptions have us screaming.

To properly appreciate a good TV show, you need to let it sit for a bit. A cliffhanger is not an invitation for instant gratification. The clue is in the name; it's supposed to leave you hanging. That's what the writer intends — for you to ruminate a little, discuss it, and come up with your own theories on what happens next. You'll have a better, richer experience that way. "Life is about not knowing," the actress and author Gilda Radner famously said. "Delicious ambiguity."
Quite apart from our physical and mental health, this culture of binge viewing robs us of time — time that might be better spent on all those creative endeavors we have at the back of our brains. I'll never forget what entrepreneur and full-time live-wire Gary Vaynerchuk said one year at South by Southwest, when a questioner complained that they didn't have enough time for their passion project.
"You have all the time in the world!" screamed Vaynerchuk. "Just stop f___ing watching Lost!"
See also: Why Sitting Too Much Is Dangerous
You could argue that there's nothing new here. We've always been couch potatoes. It wasn't so long ago that the average American family watched TV for seven hours a night. At least now we're on the edge of our seats watching quality programming, rather than slumped and glazed in front of an infomercial, right?
Wrong, because that's not necessarily how we used to watch TV. For many of us, it was wallpaper; it was white noise. You could have a hugely enjoyable conversation while some dumb sitcom droned on in the background. Regular commercials encouraged you to get up every 10 minutes, at least.
Now that we're on the hard stuff, we're less likely to talk to each other during a show. We're too busy being glued to the screen. And we have to enforce breaks with judicious use of the pause button — risking howls of protest from our fellow viewers.
Services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon have turned our TVs into candy stores where we can have as much as we want of anything we want. We may not yet have experienced the sugar crash (73% of Netflix subscribers in a recent survey described binge watching as a "good thing"), but it's coming.
Perhaps all this data on the disastrous effects of sitting too long will stop Post Play in its tracks; maybe the threat of a class-action lawsuit will force Netflix to insert a public health warning between shows. That would bring a whole new meaning to "viewer discretion advised."
But there's no need to wait for enforced moderation. We can turn this thing around ourselves by changing the conversation. The word "binge" literally means to soak in alcohol, and it really shouldn't be cool in any context. Let's start enjoying our awesome TV responsibly.