Inflight entertainment choices: Why you watch chick flicks on a plane

I have a confession: a few months ago, on a flight from Sydney to Dubai, I watched pretty much an entire season of the TV show, Nashville. Then, on the return leg, I watched five episodes of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

And that's not even the worst part. The worst part is that I arrived home and started telling my friends about these shows, saying that they were really good and that they should watch them.

These are not good TV shows. At least, to me they're not. These are cheesy, lame programs, one a glorified teenage soapie with a few country and western songs thrown in, and the other a comedy that has one joke, and that joke isn't very funny. And yet I watched them, and I enjoyed them, and I told other people to do the same thing. Deeply, deeply embarrassing.

I should know by now that something weird happens during long-haul travel. You find yourself enjoying these sappy, tear-jerker movies and TV shows that would never normally appeal. You lap up the emotional stuff. You enjoy having your heartstrings tugged.

Do you know how many times I've watched Crazy, Stupid, Love on a plane? I don't. I've lost count. What I do know, however, is that Ryan Gosling is a goddamn dreamboat, and Steve Carell is hilarious.

Anyway, back on topic. The only similar experience I've found to watching movies and TV shows on planes is buying wine from a cellar door: the similarity being that you can't trust yourself. At the cellar door, deep in wine country, you get swept up in the moment, in the beauty of the surroundings, in the fact you've already tried about 50 wines that day, and you end up buying a whole heap of seemingly delicious booze that turns out to be fairly average by the time you crack open a bottle at home a few (ahem) hours later.

In-flight entertainment is the same. The circumstances dictate your response, which means you should never, ever recommend a TV show or movie to a friend until you've viewed it outside of that giant metal tube in the sky. You can't trust your judgment.

There's science to back up this embarrassing phenomenon. Studies have shown that car travel – and, by extrapolation, plane travel as well – provokes a heightened emotional response in people; it encourages the brain's parasympathetic nervous system to kick in.

This is mostly because there's nothing else to concentrate on once you're strapped into a plane seat: no stresses from work, no emails to check, no family to get in touch with. It's just the hum of jet engines and a whole lot of spare time to think about where you're going and where you've been, to ponder why you don't have a better job, to consider whether getting that dog was really a good idea.