Netflix is a drug. We binge-watch episode after episode, and we are addicted to our favorite shows. We are happily unaware of our surroundings when watching the show, but shortly after watching, we often feel worse than before we started. We sedate ourselves by living in fictional worlds with fictional characters, nor is it uncommon to interact with and relate to TV drama characters more than we do our own family members. While mind-numbing entertainment has been around for a long time, evidence suggests that watching TV is far more harmful than activities such as reading and completing puzzle books.
Watching TV elicits what is called an orienting response. It is the same response that draws our attention to a change in scenery, tone of voice or shift in light. We are alerted to change. When watching TV for an extended period of time, this orienting response becomes saturated with information. Dr. Deirdre Barrett discusses this in her book "Supernormal Stimuli." She writes that people watching TV develop "a strange mix of physiological signs of high and low attention." The eyes remain affixed, but the brain is much less stimulated while watching TV. Dr. Barrett notes that of further interest, on average people burn 14.5 percent fewer calories while watching TV in comparison to lying in bed.
This metabolic depression has opposite effects from exercise. Whereas physical exercise heightens the metabolism and releases endorphins (brain-made morphine molecules which make us feel happy), watching TV is often linked to feeling less energized and more distracted. While these short-term trade-offs may not be enough to sway you from watching another episode — or five — of "Friends," these long-term effects may.
In the 1980s, TV was brought to many remote communities in the Canadian mountains. Researchers surveyed leisure time spent before the introduction of TV and five years after. TV started to replace physically active leisure activities, and Dr. Barrett writes, "Over time, both adults and children in the town became less creative on problem-solving tests, less able to persevere at tasks and less tolerant of unstructured time." Whereas physical activities offer the brain more oxygenated blood, endorphins and a boosted metabolism, TV offers less of all three. Worse still, TV does not require that we maintain an internal dialogue.
TV provides a background noise that stifles our internal problem-solving voices. Psychologist Lillian G. Katz suggested this as a plausible explanation of the significantly lower math and reading skills among children who watch TV frequently around the age of 3 and up. In the defense of the TV industry, advocates have claimed that the relationship cannot be proved to be causal — it may simply be the time spent on TV that leads to such deficits in learning. But that's just it ... time.
We only have so much time in our days. How many of those episodes were truly worth watching? How many of those long, sluggish hours do you wish you could have back? Would it not be better to sleep more, exercise more, socialize more, learn a new skill or take up a hobby? It is time that we treated our brains, bodies and actual genuine human relationships with more care. It is time that we all watched far less TV.
