The Radio Corporation of America started manufacturing and distributing color television sets on March 25, 1954, helping to usher in “a wonderful world of color.” Since that time, the number of households with TVs has steadily risen. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of homes with television sets increased from 87% in 1960 to over 99% in 2011, with the average American family owning almost 3 televisions! That’s over 250 MILLION televisions owned and watched in the U.S. alone.

And yet it is not the statistics of TV ownership that are unsettling, as much as the statistics related to our TV usage. Consider the following statistics (based on U.S. Census data and the Nielsen report of 2011) …

*The average American (including both adults & teenagers) watches over four hours of TV every day, which is over two months of uninterrupted watching per year. This means that – at current usage-rates, the average 65 year-old American will have spent 9 YEARS of his or her life idly sitting in front of a television!

*In another recent survey, 80% of toddlers (ages: infant to 6 years) were found to regularly use screen media (TV, movies &/or video games). 77% of them could turn a television on by themselves, and 67% of them could access a particular program or surf channels using a remote control … In addition, 30% of those families polled admitted that their pre-toddlers (children under the age of two) have a TV in their room.

*Over 70% of all American daycare centers use television with their charges every day, and this despite several studies clearly showing that such screen time is severely detrimental to all children under the age of three.

*Over two-thirds of all American families with children watch television while eating dinner “together”.

*The average American child spends roughly 28 hours each week watching television. In contrast, the average American parent spends only roughly 5 MINUTES each week in meaningful conversation with those same children.

*TV is so tempting that over half of all 4-6 year olds polled preferred watching television to spending quality time with their fathers.

*The average American child spends roughly 900 hours per year in school. In contrast, the average American child spends over 1500 hours a year watching television.

*The U.S. Department of Labor reported in September 2004 that watching TV ranked third in the average American’s total daily use of time, behind only working and sleeping.

*Interestingly enough, over half of all those polled believe that they watch too much TV, almost 80% of all those polled realize that television violence leads to real-life aggression, and over 70% of all parents polled would like to limit their children’s TV time — and yet the statistics for watching television still continue to rise every year.

How can this be?

Well, as it turns out, watching television is extremely addictive …

HOW TV GETS YOU HOOKED

Recent research has shown that brain activity switches from the left to the right hemisphere while watching television, with the right brain often being twice as active as the left. This left-to-right brain crossover releases a surge of endorphins in the viewer’s body. As we have learned in previous posts, endorphins are neurochemicals that are structurally identical to opium and its derivatives (morphine, codeine, heroin, etc.). As such, it can come as no surprise that activities that release these endorphins (like watching television) are highly addictive.

Indeed, it has been shown in several studies that even casual television viewers experience opiate-like withdrawal symptoms if they stop watching TV for a period of time. In one of those experiments, 182 subjects agreed to kick their television viewing habit for a year, with the added incentive of a substantial monetary payment if they succeeded. None of them could resist the urge for longer than six months, and over time all of them showed clear symptoms of opiate-withdrawal: intensified anxiety, chronic frustration, and clinical depression.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF WATCHING TV

While many sincerely believe that “watching just a little TV can’t hurt”, such people are seriously mistaken. In fact, of all the addictions discussed in this series, television poses one of the greatest threats to one’s quality of life.

In 1982, the National Institute of Mental Health and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services contracted the leading television researchers — professors from Harvard, Stanford, the University of North Carolina, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale — to summarize scientific opinion about the risks associated with watching television. Their highly critical two-volume statement shook the world of research-psychologists and inspired a flood of thousands of subsequent investigations that confirmed the early findings, providing a rich bank of research conclusively documenting the negative effects of exposure to television.

Previous posts have already mentioned some of these harms – that exposure to modern-day TV programming and advertisements has been shown to increase one’s alcohol consumption, increase one’s fast food consumption, lower one’s sense of self-esteem (especially in young girls) and adversely affect one’s overall health (dramatically increases the likelihood that you will become overweight) … And yet there are other negative consequences of watching television; consequences that are far more damaging.

*Watching Television LEADS TO VIOLENT BEHAVIOR

To date there have been over 4000 studies done on the effects of television on its viewers, and they consistently show that media violence contributes to aggressive behavior, nightmares, and fear of being harmed. Watching violent TV programs has also been linked with having less empathy toward others.

Between 1952 and 1992 the average number of violent acts per viewing hour steadily rose from 6.2 to 32. In 1993, the most violent prime-time shows exhibited as many as 60 acts of violence per hour. Today, by the time the average child in America reaches the age of 18, he or she will have witnessed well over 200,000 violent acts on television.

Given that homicide is an adult activity, and that television has its most powerful effect on our impressionable youth, the initial “television-generation” would have had to age 10 to 15 years before they would have been old enough to affect the homicide rate. Not surprisingly, a University of Washington research team indeed found that ten to fifteen years after television arrived in the United States and Canada, homicide rates in both countries suddenly jumped by 92% and 93%, respectively. In contrast, in South Africa, where television had yet to arrive, rates remained consistently low throughout this period. A follow-up study conducted after television’s arrival in South Africa found that homicide rates there followed the North American pattern, jumping 130% fourteen years after television’s introduction.

Researchers from the University of Illinois subsequently discovered that the amount of television children watched at eight years old was the single most powerful predictor of violent behavior at age thirty — more than poverty, grades, a single-parent home, or even exposure to real violence. A follow-up investigation then studied more than a thousand children in Australia, Finland, Israel, the Netherlands, and Poland over a three-year period. This international sampling produced identical results: exposure to television in childhood was the single greatest determinant of aggressive behavior in adults. To date, more than a thousand investigations have documented a causal link between television viewing and violent behavior, and no study has yet contradicted that finding.

Extrapolating on this research, the Journal of the American Medical Association noted that if television technology had never been developed, today there would be 10,000 fewer homicides each year in the United States, 70,000 fewer rapes, and 700,000 fewer violent assaults.

To sum it all up in a nutshell: television makes you angry.

*Watching Television causes a LOSS of BASIC BRAIN FUNCTION

The United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare conducted the first large-scale American study on television’s effects on intelligence. The survey, covering 650,000 students in 4,000 U.S. schools, discovered that the more television students watched, the lower their achievement scores. Statewide assessment programs conducted in Rhode Island (1975-76), Connecticut (1978-79), and Pennsylvania (1978-79) surveyed thousands of children and came up with remarkably similar results: the more television children watched, the worse they performed in all academic areas.

There’s a reason behind the coining of the term “couch potato”. Research has shown that when you are watching TV, your higher brain regions shut down, and brain activities shift to its lower regions – regions permanently set in a response mode of “fight or flight”. Over time, watching television causes your higher brain regions to atrophy due to lack of usage. Indeed, studies have consistently shown that TV viewing among children leads to lower attention spans and poor brain development.

Drs. Larry Gross and Michael Morgan, professors at the University of Pennsylvania, made headlines when they found that television did not just impair academic achievement, it retarded intelligence. They discovered that the more television tenth graders watched, the lower they scored on IQ tests. The inverse relationship between IQ and television watching held even after the researchers controlled for socio-economic status, sex, and family size.

And in a later study, Harvard University Professor T. Berry Brazelton hooked newborn babies up to electroencephalographs and then exposed them to a flickering light source that mimicked that of a television. After only fifteen minutes of exposure, the babies stopped responding to external stimuli and produced sleep patterns on the EEG, even though their eyes were still open and observing the light. This experiment revealed that television acts directly on the brain to suppress mental activity.

Every activity a child engages in during his busy day refines some set of skills. Reading is practice; writing is practice; sports is practice; engaging in fantasy games is practice; and interacting with people is practice. All these activities in some way help prepare a child for the challenges of adult life. Television is also practice, but not for any activity. Television is practice for inactivity.

When children watch television they are practicing sleeping.

To sum it all up in a nutshell: television makes you stupid.

*Watching Television causes a LOSS of SOCIAL INTERACTION

An experiment carried out by researchers at the University of New Orleans measured the social skills of first graders in relation to how much or how little television they watched. After controlling for a range of other variables (including sleep, time spent with peers and family, parents’ educational levels, etc.), the number one determinant of social skills was how little television the child watched. Basically, those children who watched the least television had the best social skills.

“The more entertainment television you watch, the less civically engaged you are … [Initially], you don’t know which caused which; whether people decide to drop out and are left with television, or whether they start watching television and then drop out. [And yet] the evidence is clear that television is actually the cause of this.” ~ NPR’s “All Things Considered”

To sum it all up in a nutshell: television makes you lonely.

*Watching Television causes a LOSS of WILLPOWER

It has been found that watching television produces a physiological feeling of calm that is quite addictive. And yet alongside this false sense of peace, watching TV also makes viewers passive and unfocused. Interestingly enough, a recent study found that, while the sense of feeling relaxed dissipates for viewers once the television is turned off, their feelings of passivity and lowered alertness continue. Survey participants consistently reported reflect that television somehow absorbed or sucked out their energy, leaving them feeling depleted and befuddled.

“After playing sports or engaging in hobbies, people report improvements in mood. After watching TV, people’s moods are [often] worse than before [they started watching].” ~ Prof. Robert Kubey (Rutgers University)

To sum it all up in a nutshell: television makes you weak.

*Watching Television causes INCREASED ANXIETY

When we watch television, activity in the higher brain regions (such as the neo-cortex) is diminished, while activity in the lower brain regions (such as the limbic system) is enhanced. The latter, commonly referred to as the reptile brain, is associated with more primitive mental functions, especially the “fight or flight” response. In addition, the reptile brain is unable to distinguish between the actual reality of your surroundings and the simulated reality of television. To the reptile brain, if it looks real, it is real.

Thus, even though we know on a conscious level that what we are watching is “only on television,” on a conscious level we do not–the heart beats faster, for instance, while we watch a suspenseful scene. Similarly, we know the commercial is trying to manipulate us, but on an unconscious level the commercial nonetheless succeeds in, say, making us feel inadequate until we buy whatever thing is being advertised–and the effect is all the more powerful because it is unconscious, operating on the deepest level of human response. The reptile brain makes it possible for us to survive as biological beings, but it also leaves us vulnerable to the manipulations of television programmers. This is where the manipulators use our own emotions as strings to control us. The distortions and directions we are being moved to are taking place in the subconscious, often undetected.

To sum it all up in a nutshell: television makes you a slave.

“Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past.” ~ George Orwell

RECOGNIZING YOUR OWN ADDICTION

Because we tend to “zone out” when watching television, and because watching television is both physically and mentally addictive, it can be a very difficult addiction to recognize. To help you do so, I offer the following questions.

*Do you watch more than one hour of television a day?

*Do you plan your weekly schedule around your favorite TV programs?

*Do you refuse to go out with friends on nights when your favorite shows are on?

*Do you have a TV in your bedroom?

*Do you get agitated when you miss one of your favorite shows (or even panic when about to miss the same)?

*Do you own more than one television?

*Do you record shows to be able to watch them later if you can’t watch them live?

*Do you use your TV as a baby-sitter for your children?

*Do you desire to have the remote control nearby or even hold it in your hand while you watch?

*Do you eat in front of the television?

*Do you “shhhh” people who are talking or otherwise making noise while you are watching?

*Do you know the channel and air-times for more than three weekly shows?

If you answered “yes” to more than one of these questions, then you too are at least mildly addicted to watching television, and you to could benefit greatly from freeing yourself from its clutches.

There is a reason why you snap at others or feel extra irritated after watching TV … When this happens, you are not just “in a bad mood”.

It’s not you, IT’S YOUR TELEVISION …

There is a reason that you feel ‘brain dead” or “foggy” after watching TV … When this happens, you are not just “a little off” or being “momentarily forgetful”.

It’s not you, IT’S YOUR TELEVISION …

And there is a reason why you feel “hypnotized” or listless after watching TV. When this happens, you are not just “a little tired” or simply “feeling unmotivated” … You are literally being hypnotized by your TV.

Again, it’s not you … IT’S YOUR TELEVISION!!!

While the post that follows this one will provide you with a number of practical tips to help you free yourself from television’s insidious grasp, ultimately there is only one solution to TV.

Can you guess what it is?

And much more importantly … will you have enough Self-Respect to follow through it?

I wonder …

… and so does your television.