The Forums › Forums › I Just Found Out! › Addictions/Self Medicating › My ADDiction to TV – I Love It, But It Doesn't Love Me Back. Help!!! › Reply To: My ADDiction to TV – I Love It, But It Doesn't Love Me Back. Help!!!
Oh, I know this one. For more and more people it’s the Internet, not TV, but it’s the same thing.
TV is a tricky thing. Since I have been making TV shows for the past 30 years I know they are addicting. Real life can’t compete with a half hour or hour that was created by a dozen writers, hundreds of creative people, and then honed into a seamless gem.
Constant surprises and laughs and plot twists give you endless jolts of dopamine.
Dunno if you saw this headline, but one of the writers of the series Lost admitted they had no idea what it all meant or how it was all supposed to fit together. They just kept thinking up one zany idea after another. “What’s the most bizarre or unexpected thing we can do.”
I pictured all those regular viewers who spent all those hours watching, and then debating what it all meant, trying to figure it out… What a waste. Can you sue someone to get 200 hours of your life back? Ha.
Oh and another study found that 50% of what is reported on Fox News is false. Not only no payoff, but actually misleading. Wow.
By the way, a study done some years ago found that every hour of TV lowered your happiness & satisfaction by 3%. Watch three hours a night, and you’re down almost 10%.
One brilliant suggestion: hide the remote. You wanna change channels, you have to get up. And you can’t go surfing, trying to find something worth watching. Every time we visit one of my elderly relatives she has the TV on. And she always says, “Nothing good on. Never is.” And yet the TV is always on.
Get rid of the PVR. And then as Lailamoon pointed out, you have to sit through commercials, or get up and do something.
Another suggestion: Only turn it on for a program you want to see. If you flop down after dinner, beat, and go searching… maybe there’s a book you could try instead.
Another suggestion: If you do sit down to unwind watching a show you like, turn it off when it’s done. If you don’t have the willpower put a timer on the TV, like you have for switching lights on and off when you’re not home. So when the show is over, the TV goes off.
Another suggestion: do something while you’re watching TV. The perfect opportunity to do something somewhat mindless like sort receipts, sign bills, or have it on in the TV and make healthy pots of food that you can divide up into containers, freeze, and have healthy meals.
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