During the last decade, if there´s something that had been elusive to me, was putting an end to my enormous TV watching habit.
I used to watch TV for hours each day. That went on for years. And life was grand, but I was aware it was not very good for me. The day after those unending TV sessions I always felt mentally and physically drained, as if I were a zombie. And overall slow, and not in a very good mood. I sometimes wonder how did I even manage to accomplish anything, living that way.
I also wasn’t sleeping as well as I could. That is, if I did even manage to sleep enough. Tearing my eyes from the TV to actually close them and going to sleep was hard.
I knew I had to put an end it.
Over the years I tried at least twice to completely stop watching TV, both of those tries failing miserably around the 3-month mark.
The mechanisms that make TV highly addictive are well documented. For all intents it’s actually a very powerful and sneaky drug.
Many things happen at the same time when you watch TV. You immediately enter a kind of pleasurable trance, in which your brain almost stops doing any work altogether, and you become very susceptible to what you are watching.
Meanwhile, you are bombarded with all kinds of fantastic scenarios, that your mind, that can’t really completely tell the difference between that and reality, experiences it as if you were there.
Add to this sensitive mental state all the stimulating visuals, emotive music, and all kinds of sounds. Together, this produces a lot of engagement, and with it, very huge and abnormal Dopamine spikes. It becomes an effortless escapism experience. A cozy refuge. A friend, even.
(Note: Dopamine is the neurotransmitter in our brains that governs pleasure.)
Of course, all this pleasure has a price. At the end, you are drained mentally from having to quickly process an unusually large quantity of rapid changing images; emotionally, as you had to endure all kinds of emotive and dramatic scenarios, that were made more intense thanks to that wonderful music accompanying the visuals; and of course, you rapidly depleted your dopamine reserves, and now you may feel down.
You probably feel visually tired too, as you had to keep your eyes opened and focused a long time on that beautiful 4K image coming from a high-intensity blue light emitting, not so eye-friendly device.
And worst of all, after all that TV watching, suddenly, you find that many hours have passed, like in a flash. I like to say TV is like a time-machine: you turn it on and you instantly travel to the future.
Oh, and one more thing. In my experience, no matter how many hours I spent, I never felt I watched all the TV I wanted. It was like I was never satiated, somehow, even if I just completed a marathon of heroic length glued to the dumb-box.
So anyway, there’s no doubt that TV is highly addictive, and it’s no surprise it’s considered normal to spend many hours a day watching TV. Everyone´s doing it. They can’t help it. In fact, when regular TV watchers start unfulfilling their daily watching quota, they actually experience a similar kind of pain to what a drug addict experiences when they don’t get their fix.
Not watching any TV is what it’s actually considered “not normal” in our modern lives. That is sad. Just think about this: all those people you watch on TV, and you think they´re awesome, and have awesome lives, they don’t spend their time watching TV. Why should you?
In the end, I always knew it was coming. I had to stop it, if I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life stuck to the screen like a junkie.
The determination to stop watching TV for good came, ironically, while watching a movie. Join me soon for the epic conclusion to this ridiculous journey.
