105 hours: TV is a behavioral drug

I use a set of tactics and principles to manage my time. I call it 105 hours.

It helps me allocate the 105 hours I have in the week.

We spend several hours in front of the TV, watching our favorite TV show to rest after our daily grind at work.

But despite all this time resting in front of the TV, we still feel constantly tired.

Why?

We need to balance work and rest

I'll start by saying we absolutely need to balance work and rest. I'm not suggesting we replace the TV after work with more work, learning a new language, or any other "productive" activity.

If anything, we work while tired and don't rest enough to perform at our highest level.

Literature seems to back this up. The studies on expert performance by Anders Ericsson from Florida State University show top performers can't practice for too many hours a day and often need a nap in the middle.

Maintaining this sort of focus is hard work, however, even for experts who have been doing it for years. As I noted in chapter 4, the violin students I studied at the Berlin academy found their training so tiring that they would often take a midday nap between their morning and afternoon practice sessions. People who are just learning to focus on their practice won’t be able to maintain it for several hours. Instead, they’ll need to start out with much shorter sessions and gradually work up.

Ericsson, Anders; Pool, Robert. Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (p. 154). HMH Books. Kindle Edition.

We have clear limits to how much we can perform at the highest level of intellectual exertion in a day.

In short, I agree we must balance work and rest, exertion and recovery. I'm with you.

But TV doesn't rest us

What is unclear to me is that TV is an effective restful activity, an area that is unfortunately poorly researched despite the prevalence of TV usage.

And use it we do! In the book The Art of Rest, Claudia Hammond says we consume an estimated 3.5 billion hours of TV annually.

This means TV is the top activity we spend our personal time on in our lives.

[..] by the age of seventy-five the average person will have spent a total of nine years watching television – that is more time than we spend doing anything apart from sleeping and working. A sobering thought, even for people like me who stick up for TV.

Claudia Hammond, The Art of Rest, pag 32.

TV is a popular downtime activity, but it's unclear whether it's effective. Effective rest means effectively recovering our ability to perform.

Instead, we do what Matthew Walker describes in the book Why We Sleep as "sleep procrastination": we watch TV "more than we should," and we stay up "later than we wanted." We cut back on sleep today and wake up tired the following day.

And that's not even counting the impact of blue light screens in disturbing our sleep. As Matthew Walker tells us:

[..], a new invention in 1997 made the situation far worse: blue light–emitting diodes, or blue LEDs. [..] they may be inadvertently shortening and disrupting our own sleep. The light receptors in the eye that communicate “daytime” to the suprachiasmatic nucleus are most sensitive to short-wavelength light within the blue spectrum — the exact sweet spot where blue LEDs are most powerful. [..]

Of course, few of us stare headlong into the glare of an LED lamp each evening. But we do stare at LED-powered laptop screens, smartphones, and tablets each night, sometimes for many hours, often with these devices just feet or even inches away from our retinas. A recent survey of over fifteen hundred American adults found that 90 percent of individuals regularly used some form of portable electronic device sixty minutes or less before bedtime.

Walker, Matthew. Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams (p. 269). Scribner. Kindle Edition.

The negative impact of blue light on sleep is important, given how much of our night is occupied by our phones and laptops.

Sleep, our necessary restful activity, is being disrupted by TV, an unproven and ineffective restful activity.

But if TV disrupts our rest, why do we watch it so much to wind down?

TV and behavioral drugs

I think we use TV for similar reasons we may use alcohol, sweets, and other drugs: for their psychoactive effects.

We watch TV to directly change our brains and our feelings.

TV changes how we feel in a few crucial ways:

1) Escapism: By pulling us away from the bad feelings caused by our current situation.

2) Delusion: Giving us feelings we weren't supposed to feel in our current situation and that don't correspond to our reality.

3) Loneliness-Avoidance: Giving us the false perception of togetherness and helping us not be alone with our thoughts and feelings.

In the book The Art of Rest, Claudia Hammond reports comments from a study by Barbara Lee and Robert Lee surveying people early in TV's introduction to their homes. Here's what they had to say about this restful activity:

"It's a decompression chamber, immersion in a fantasy world for a few moments, a few hours. Delightful."
"I don't think about anything, I don't think about my kids, my wife, or anything. I'm not there. I'm not at school and I'm not at home. I'm in the TV screen. I'm in there with them."
"I feel refreshed. I haven't done anything for two hours except rest my bones and my mind. Then I go out . . . I'm ready to do another five hours of work."
"I become serene and relaxed. It's almost as if I took a tranquilizer."

Claudia Hammond, The Art of Rest, pag 32.

Many decades ago, the terminology we used to describe the effect of TV was already a mix of escaping, turning off thoughts, and drug analogies – a psychoactive behavioral activity we use to manipulate and influence how we feel.

Using TV to cope with reality

There's a joke about the drug addict who believes he controls his addiction: "I can stop using it whenever I want. I just can't want to stop!"

Digital distractions and other behavioral addictions may play a more important role in our lives than we think. It's easy to believe that watching TV is innocuous and that we could easily do without it.

But Escapism, Delusion, and Loneliness-Avoidance are coping mechanisms for real problems, and many of us would struggle to cope with those problems without this help.

Cal Newport reports on the role of digital distractions in the book Digital Minimalism:

The more I study this topic, the more it becomes clear to me that low-quality digital distractions play a more important role in people’s lives than they imagine. In recent years, as the boundary between work and life blends, jobs become more demanding, and community traditions degrade, more and more people are failing to cultivate the high-quality leisure lives that Aristotle identifies as crucial for human happiness. This leaves a void that would be near unbearable if confronted, but that can be ignored with the help of digital noise. It’s now easy to fill the gaps between work and caring for your family and sleep by pulling out a smartphone or tablet, and numbing yourself with mindless swiping and tapping. Erecting barriers against the existential is not new — before YouTube we had (and still have) mindless television and heavy drinking to help avoid deeper questions — but the advanced technologies of the twenty-first-century attention economy are particularly effective at this task.

[..] Harris felt uncomfortable, in other words, not because he was craving a particular digital habit, but because he didn’t know what to do with himself once his general access to the world of connected screens was removed.

Newport, Cal. Digital Minimalism (p. 168). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

As the author continues, it is crucial to understand what the distractions are distracting us from and to tackle those issues head-on:

If you want to succeed with digital minimalism, you cannot ignore this reality. If you begin decluttering the low-value digital distractions from your life before you’ve convincingly filled in the void they were helping you ignore, the experience will be unnecessarily unpleasant at best and a massive failure at worse. The most successful digital minimalists, therefore, tend to start their conversion by renovating what they do with their free time — cultivating high-quality leisure before culling the worst of their digital habits. In fact, many minimalists will describe a phenomenon in which digital habits that they previously felt to be essential to their daily schedule suddenly seemed frivolous once they became more intentional about what they did with their time. When the void is filled, you no longer need distractions to help you avoid it.

Newport, Cal. Digital Minimalism (pp. 168-169). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Aligning our feelings to reality

TV doesn't provide us with rest; it gives us respite: Escapism, Delusion, and Loneliness-Avoidance we use to cope with the hard parts of our reality.

But these negative feelings, the ones TV and other digital distractions help us avoid, are necessary sensors about reality: they're trying to tell us their story about how things are and what is wrong.

When reality makes us feel things we'd rather not feel, we have two choices: change the feelings or change the reality.

Often the right thing to do about a negative feeling is to address it by changing our reality, not to avoid it by escaping it or deluding ourselves.

The good news is that skipping digital distractions helps us face these realities head-on and gives us the needed rest and time to do it.