Turning off the TV to change your life
How does TV affect your health?
You may have heard that over the last few decades there have been approximately 3,000 studies conducted on the effects of TV watching on health.
What you probably didn’t hear was how many of those studies concluded that TV is unhealthy. The number of studies that supported this claim was 2,888, according to Dr. John Nelson of the American Medical Association. Dr. Nelson, along with many other health professionals, endorses National TV-Turnoff Week.
Millions of Americans are so addicted to watching TV that the their behavior meets the criteria for substance abuse according to the official psychiatric manual, says Rutgers University psychologist and TV-Free America board member Robert Kubey.
What are the symptoms of TV addiction?
Why does TV make you gain weight? It’s not necessarily that it makes you gain weigh as much as it prevents you from losing weight. Almost any activity burns more calories per hour than watching TV, except for sleeping.
And then there are the effects of fast-food and restaurant commercials showing luscious, tasty food…which drives you to the kitchen to grab a snack.
The effect that TV has on your children may be even worse. Children are more likely to be influenced by what they see on TV because their value and belief systems are not yet fully formed.
By the age of eighteen, the average child in America has seen 200,000 acts of violence on TV, including 40,000 murders. This acts to desensitize children to violence and murder.
There are many benefits to reducing the amount of time your family spends watching TV. Gerry Morton, CEO of EnergyFirst, has these suggestions for getting started:
One study, in particular, found that when people watch TV higher brain centers shut down, leading to a lack of critical thinking. In other words, when you watch TV you are more likely to accept what you are being told instead of questioning things.
No News is Good News:
The point of view from which news is presented is similar to the negative bias of depressives. It is a fact that feelings of helplessness and hopelessness cause health problems. And studies have shown that the greater majority of network news is about people with no control over their tragedy. Christopher Peterson, one of the first researchers to show that pessimism negatively effects health, said, "What the evening news is telling you is that bad things happen, they hit at random, and there's nothing you can do about it." That is a formula for pessimism, cynicism, and their inevitable result: anxiety and depression.
In one study of network news, seventy-one percent of the news stories were about people who had very little control over their fate. This is neither an accurate nor a helpful perspective on the world. Highly trained professionals scour the world to find stories like that and the way the stories are presented gives the impression that those kinds of events are more common than they really are.
The Center for Media and Public Affairs did a study on network coverage of murder. Between 1990 and 1995, the murder rate in the U.S. went down thirteen percent. But during that same period, network coverage of murders increased three hundred percent. If you happened to watch a lot of news during that period, you would probably have gotten the impression that murders in America were escalating out of control, when in fact the situation was improving.
Pessimism is bad for your health, and bad for the planet because pessimism not only saps motivation to take constructive action, it is contagious.
A SOURCE OF ADRENALINE:
A survey by the Harvard School of Public Health found that although a person's risk of getting seriously injured in a car accident is only about five percent, most people believed it was more like fifty percent. Men thought they had a one in three chance of getting prostrate cancer, but it is actually more like one in ten. Women thought they had a forty percent chance of getting breast cancer when actually it's more like ten percent. And for diabetes, HIV and strokes, most people thought they had twice the chance as they actually do. That's a lot of unnecessary and unwarranted worry and anxiety.
Where do you think we get these worries? Newscasters have a vested interest in scaring the bejeezus out of us. Many forms of media besides television use fear to capture your attention or motivate you to buy. Why? Because it works. A scary sentence or image arrests attention better than an interesting, helpful, or entertaining sentence or image.
What good does it do you to know this? Simply this: You subject yourself voluntarily to adrenaline-inducing sources when you watch the news or watch TV with commercials or read a newspaper. And you can reduce your general perception of the world as a scary place by spending more time dealing with reality — solid reality like your neighborhood, your friends, your real life — and less time in the artificially-selected, artificially-created, designed-for-impact world of the news media and advertisements.
You may have heard that over the last few decades there have been approximately 3,000 studies conducted on the effects of TV watching on health.
What you probably didn’t hear was how many of those studies concluded that TV is unhealthy. The number of studies that supported this claim was 2,888, according to Dr. John Nelson of the American Medical Association. Dr. Nelson, along with many other health professionals, endorses National TV-Turnoff Week.
Millions of Americans are so addicted to watching TV that the their behavior meets the criteria for substance abuse according to the official psychiatric manual, says Rutgers University psychologist and TV-Free America board member Robert Kubey.
What are the symptoms of TV addiction?
- The use of TV as a sedative
- Watching anything that comes on just to watch something
- Feeling like you’re not in control
- Getting angry with yourself for watching too much
- Lack of ability to stop watching
- Feeling irritable when you can’t watch
Why does TV make you gain weight? It’s not necessarily that it makes you gain weigh as much as it prevents you from losing weight. Almost any activity burns more calories per hour than watching TV, except for sleeping.
And then there are the effects of fast-food and restaurant commercials showing luscious, tasty food…which drives you to the kitchen to grab a snack.
The effect that TV has on your children may be even worse. Children are more likely to be influenced by what they see on TV because their value and belief systems are not yet fully formed.
By the age of eighteen, the average child in America has seen 200,000 acts of violence on TV, including 40,000 murders. This acts to desensitize children to violence and murder.
There are many benefits to reducing the amount of time your family spends watching TV. Gerry Morton, CEO of EnergyFirst, has these suggestions for getting started:
- Turn off the TV and leave it off for one week.
- During that time, make a list of the shows you like best.
- List the shows in priority order.
- Make a TV schedule that allows for no more than one hour per day of TV.
- Do not eat in front of the TV
- Have TV-free meals in which family members talk and interact
One study, in particular, found that when people watch TV higher brain centers shut down, leading to a lack of critical thinking. In other words, when you watch TV you are more likely to accept what you are being told instead of questioning things.
No News is Good News:
The point of view from which news is presented is similar to the negative bias of depressives. It is a fact that feelings of helplessness and hopelessness cause health problems. And studies have shown that the greater majority of network news is about people with no control over their tragedy. Christopher Peterson, one of the first researchers to show that pessimism negatively effects health, said, "What the evening news is telling you is that bad things happen, they hit at random, and there's nothing you can do about it." That is a formula for pessimism, cynicism, and their inevitable result: anxiety and depression.
In one study of network news, seventy-one percent of the news stories were about people who had very little control over their fate. This is neither an accurate nor a helpful perspective on the world. Highly trained professionals scour the world to find stories like that and the way the stories are presented gives the impression that those kinds of events are more common than they really are.
The Center for Media and Public Affairs did a study on network coverage of murder. Between 1990 and 1995, the murder rate in the U.S. went down thirteen percent. But during that same period, network coverage of murders increased three hundred percent. If you happened to watch a lot of news during that period, you would probably have gotten the impression that murders in America were escalating out of control, when in fact the situation was improving.
Pessimism is bad for your health, and bad for the planet because pessimism not only saps motivation to take constructive action, it is contagious.
A SOURCE OF ADRENALINE:
A survey by the Harvard School of Public Health found that although a person's risk of getting seriously injured in a car accident is only about five percent, most people believed it was more like fifty percent. Men thought they had a one in three chance of getting prostrate cancer, but it is actually more like one in ten. Women thought they had a forty percent chance of getting breast cancer when actually it's more like ten percent. And for diabetes, HIV and strokes, most people thought they had twice the chance as they actually do. That's a lot of unnecessary and unwarranted worry and anxiety.
Where do you think we get these worries? Newscasters have a vested interest in scaring the bejeezus out of us. Many forms of media besides television use fear to capture your attention or motivate you to buy. Why? Because it works. A scary sentence or image arrests attention better than an interesting, helpful, or entertaining sentence or image.
What good does it do you to know this? Simply this: You subject yourself voluntarily to adrenaline-inducing sources when you watch the news or watch TV with commercials or read a newspaper. And you can reduce your general perception of the world as a scary place by spending more time dealing with reality — solid reality like your neighborhood, your friends, your real life — and less time in the artificially-selected, artificially-created, designed-for-impact world of the news media and advertisements.
