8 Reasons Why Your Television Is Killing You

Television has become the new dirty bad habit. Whether you know this or not, television is actually destroying your life. Once upon a time, we all thought and believed that watching television was good for us. For most of us, watching television also means kicking back and lounging for extended periods of time. This span of inactivity has been found to reduce our lifespan.

We only see what the media decides to show us, which is usually the most stunning and shocking news. Television becomes a natural part of our lives, being so widespread, being everywhere you go, from the healthclubs to the gas pump, and when your filling up your tank. It is part of mainstream society.

1. Television causes negativity. It becomes so widespread with it's limited beliefs. The media chooses the stories that they want us to see. We are constantly exposed to biased news, which is most often violent or disturbing. This is because people are drawn to popular and often shocking stories. Watching this shock value on a daily basis causes us to shift our views and become desensitized. We bring this into our own lives, which is bringing constant negativity into it.

2. Television numbs your mind and drains your motivation to live your own life. Much of the mindless entertainment that we watch today has a negative impact on how we view and live our own lives. People tend to start living their lives through certain programs which makes people think that they are actually living lives for themselves. Its easy to identify with characters that look as they are living the lives that we wish we could be living.

3. Television promotes laziness because it is so easy to plug in after a long day at work. This becomes a habit and feels like a reward after a hard day's work. In reality, this is not taking away your stresses, this is making you feel satisfied through watching others doing or reporting something that they are doing big with their lives. It’s become the norm for being comfortable to lounge and watch tv.

4. Television destroys your schedule. It takes away from your limited discretionary time in your life. This is time taken that you could be used for growing in all the areas in your life. We start watching entertainment and don’t realize how long we have been sitting there in a daze. Time seems to fly by while we are entertaining our brains in front of the tube.

5. Advertising in television unconsciously changes your mind. Ads are built in to entertainment shows that you are directed towards. We become unaware of some of the ads that are driving us to shallow beliefs and leads us to think like the general masses of people. We start to buy into quick fixes and magic pills which prevents us from taking the corrrect path that brings us to success. In reality, there are no shortcuts to true winnings. Advertisement tells us otherwise. Commercials are constantly showing us that there is a better and easier way to get there.

6. Watching television reduces your lifespan and is linked to premature death. TV viewing time can be associated with a loss of life, comparable to chronic diseases from physical inactivity to heart disease. Studies show this sedentary lifestyle results in premature deaths, obesity, and many other weight-related health problems. It has been estimated that once you're over 25, every hour of television you watch reduces your life expectancy by close to 22 minutes.

7. Television desensitzes us and gives us a false sense of reality. We get a false sense of comfort when misleading advertisement and news shows make things look so easy to do. Instead of putting time into our goals, we tend to use shortcuts that actually cause us to spend more money and fail at our future successes. We think that everyone else is doing it and it must be the easier way,so we should be doing it also.

8. Television is a major distraction to our lives. Viewed news cases are biased and choose to focus on negative events, people, and places. Television shifts our minds and changes the way society views lives. We become numb to life-changing events and distracted to the point of living in a false reality of our mainstream society.

We only have so much time on this earth and when we watch television we are reducing our lifespan, numbing our minds, and killing our time.

Gura, Leo. 2014, September 29. How To Stop Watching Television- Why You Must Eliminate TV Right Now! http://www.actualized.org.

D.W. Dunstan, E.L.M. Barr, G.N. Healy, J. Salmon, J.E. Shaw, B. Balkau, D.J. Magliano, A.J. Cameron, P.Z. Zimmet, N. Owen. 2010, January 25. Television View and Morality, http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/121/3/384.short