Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Dear Reader,
How much time, in a typical week, do you invest in watching television?
An hour a day? 5 hours a day? More than that?
According to a 2012 Nielsen study, the average American watches 34 hours of tele
vision per week. 34 hours !!!
As much as I wish I could say that I wasn't among the rest of us in this regard,
until recently, I've been a TV junkie. Just like you probably are.
We could, literally, work another full-time job with just a few more hours!!
Do you get the same return, financial or otherwise from your television viewing
as you do from your non-tv time?
My guess is we actually don't.
So, what is the impact of television:
First, as we've already discussed, time. 34 hours per week, times 52 weeks is an
amazing 1,768 hours each year!
What couldn't you do in 1,768 hours?!
How many times have you said, "I'm so busy", or "I don't have enough time." Why
not? Well, could it be we have made television viewing a higher priority than al
most everything else?
A couple of years ago I watched the entire 180 or so episodes of the show LOST o
n Netflix. They were generally about 42 minutes long. If you are going to watch
shows, services like Netflix are great because you get to skip the 20 or so minu
tes of explicit advertising that you get for watching network television.
I did it in a several month marathon. 4-5 hours a day (sometimes more), for week
s!
It seemed so important, and so meaningful.
We skipped sending Christmas cards that year so I could focus on LOST.
Part of time is the opportunity cost. Opportunity cost, as many of you will be f
amiliar with, is a term from economics that refers to the price of not doing you
r next best opportunity.
Maybe you have a desire to get into shape, or learn a new skill, or just get and
keep the house clean and organized. Some of you may want to pursue spiritual pr
actices, like meditation and prayer. Some of us may be inclined to start a busin
ess.
The truth is if you completely dropped television viewing from your life altoget
her, and thereby reclaimed your 1,800 hours per year, you could do all the above
, and still have time to get caught up on your sleep!
Why do we watch sooo much television?
Is it the high quality content that makes it worth it? Perhaps in some cases. Ho
hing else?
Furthermore, we spend even more time talking about and thinking about, and even
dreaming about the things we watch. Particularly, those high adrenaline moments.
Those are the slightly traumatizing moments. Our brains have the job of trying
to process those memories.
I think of this as residual trauma.
Generally, what we see on the tv is less traumatizing than the negative events a
nd stressful moments of real life, so we don't generally notice.
Suppose giving a speech, or a job interview is a stressor of a 7 on a scale from
0 -total tranquility, and 10 maximum stressed. Watching a show might rank 1-4.
Comparatively speaking it doesn't feel like stress. It feels like relaxation, bu
t make no mistake about it we are stressing and traumatizing ourselves just at o
r below the threshold for real life stress.
So, what do you do? Give up all TV. That would be a good choice, although for mo
st of us, not realistic.
Stephen Covey recommends in his classic Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,
to limit television viewing to 7 hours per week.
That means you have to be very selective. It also means you have about 28 or so
hours per week to actually make your life great.
To your profound personal development,
Robert Holzhauser