Your Best Friend, Television, Is Bad For You
It's being alleged that among the obvious triggers of unhappiness—money problems, illness, getting your heart broken—there's an activity common to nearly all of us. We've grown up with it, turned to it when we're feeling anxious or insecure, used it to oil the wheels of social interactions, and basically understood it to be the glue that holds our society together. Yet we're now being told that television might (it feels sacriligious to even say it!) be making us unhappy.
University of Maryland researchers, after analyzing the viewing habits of 45,000 participants, have concluded that the number of hours of TV watched is directly correlated with levels of unhappiness: "When we asked people who say they are unhappy how many hours of TV per day they watch, they were reporting 4, 5 and even 10 hours a day."
It seems cruel, especially now that there are so many unemployed, to stigmatize the easiest way to fill those empty, lonely hours, but according to psychiatrist Dr. Scott Halzman: "If it doesn't have genuine meaning, an activity fills time and provides entertainment but does not provide lasting happiness." Call us crazy, but that sounds like a man who's never spent an entire Sunday in the company of Million Dollar Listing.
Still, if this is prompting concern about your own viewing habits, we would advise caution: There's always a risk that if you stop watching TV, you might be tempted to actually say so out loud, as in "Who is this Lauren Conrad? Oh, no, I don't watch television." And everyone knows those people rank somewhere lower than child molesters.
