Turn off your TV to lower stress
People often say their lives seem hectic. They feel pressured, dissatisfied in ways they find hard to define, overwhelmed by the turmoil of the world around them, which seems to be spinning out of control. Sound familiar?
A simple change can help. Stop watching broadcast television, cable, or satellite dish. Can living a less stressful, more satisfying, and more peaceful life be that easy? It has been for us.
It has been years since Elly and I watched broadcast TV or subscribed to cable or satellite dish service. I clearly recall canceling satellite, though I can’t say the specific date. It must have been quite a while back because the Kansas City Chiefs were in the NFL play offs. I went to turn the game on and our satellite receiver was broken. I tried to think how long it had been since we turned it on. When it dawned on me we hadn’t watched it in a month or two, I wondered why we were paying $80 a month for the service. My wife did too. We canceled immediately.
Giving up TV is easier than you think
Of course the first thing most people think when you suggest not watching TV is they would miss it. But you don’t have to give up movies or serial programming. We haven’t. We just get them from Netflix, an online DVD service that sends movies to your doorstep in self-return mailers. You pick out movies and programs on the Netflix website, and they’re mailed to you. The least expensive plan costs around $17 a month, including fees and taxes. (Compare that to your monthly cable or satellite bill!) That includes two DVDs out at a time. When Netflix gets a DVD back in the mail, they send the next one. It sounds cumbersome, but it isn’t.
Netflix offers a free trial period. If you don’t like the service you can cancel without paying anything. There aren’t any contracts either. You can quit any time. If you haven’t given it a try, do yourself a favor and visit their website. Blockbuster offers a similar service, but the Netflix site is better and more fun.
Why not rent movies from your local video store? Well, first they don’t offer anything like the selection available online. And it’s much more expensive. And you spend a lot of time mucking around in the store looking for movies, not to mention driving to the store, parking, driving home, returning movies, etc.
Yeah, but I won’t see the latest episode of “As the World Churns” until six months or maybe a year later! That’s right. How much does that matter? You’ve never enjoyed watching reruns?
Broadcast programming frequently presents itself as entertainment, but the underlying motive is always to twist viewers up inside one way or another. To get your money. To get your vote. To get your attention so broadcasters can get advertising money from companies that want to get your money. The feeling you are going to miss out on something if you don’t see next week’s episode is part of the package. The intention is to cause stress. To make you feel dissatisfied. To expose you in the most emotional way possible to turmoil in your community, your country, or around the world. Broadcasters will do anything they can to keep your attention riveted, and they use emotion to do it.
Don’t you think you’re being a little, well, hyperbolic?
Last summer my office was relocated to a newer facility with lots of amenities, including TV monitors mounted in the central hallways on each floor. The monitors display cable news channel programming (mostly CNN). After years of not seeing this stuff, I was reintroduced to it. The effect was amazing. If I stopped to watch for even a minute, I could feel my tension level increasing. Whatever the topic, the war in Iraq, global warming, athelete doping scandals, political wrangling in Washington, every item is presented with a “breaking news” urgency that compells attention. I learned to ignore the monitors, which I’ve come to think of as beacons of stress.
Try this experiment: spend 15 minutes reviewing news stories on the CNN website. Pick whatever interests you, but include some stories about world and national events. After that, reflect on your mental state, the amount of tension and stress you feel. Okay, now turn on CNN and watch it for 15 minutes. Afterward, do a second mental assessment. What do you notice? If you’re anything like me (or, I suspect, like most people), you’ll feel more tension and stress after watching CNN broadcast on cable or satellite than after surfing the CNN website. Why? One significant difference is that with the website you are in charge of selecting news items. After a quick scan of the available stories, you select those of interest to you. When watching the broadcast, you passively receive preselected stories. A second difference, and a more significant one with regard to stress and tension, is that the broadcast presentation incorporates video imagery (as opposed to a limited number of still images on the website) combined with audio in a way calculated to elicit the strongest emotional response from viewers.
I occasionally hear people describe themselves as “news junkies,” inevitably in reference to CNN or the Fox News network. The term is more apropos, I suspect, than they realize.
An interesting project would be to compare news broadcasts from the 1960s or 70s with current broadcasts to identify changes in news presentation and consider their impact on viewers. I haven’t researched the subject or studied it carefully, but it’s easy to imagine news corporations hiring psychologists and media consultants to design presentation formats that engage viewers to the fullest extent possible. A neighbor of mine told me he was previously employed by a nationally known beverage company to work in their marketing department doing statistical analysis on media campaigns to determine ways to increase their effectiveness. He said when you really see what’s behind some of this stuff, Fiske, it’s disturbing. No doubt! He quit his job and was accepted into a Kaufman Foundation project to recruit and train talented teachers for Kansas City’s public school system, where he now teaches.
An irony of cable/satellite news programming is that viewers are made to feel they will miss out on vitally important news if they don’t watch, when in reality news websites and print media provide far more content without the attendant emotional manipulation.
I’ve concentrated on news programming in this essay, but everything said in relation to broadcast news applies doubly to advertising, sports programming, TV series, etc.
He’s just weird
When an acquaintance asks if I’ve seen some program or show on television. I say, “No, Elly and I don’t watch television.” The person will look startled and say “Oh, but you’ve seen such and such, right?” And I repeat myself, nope. The inevitable follow up is something like “What? No television? Not even the news?” No television. No cable. No dish. (We save over a thousand dollars a year on the latter services.) Some people respond with “How do you stay in touch?” Occasionally a friend will explain to others present, “Oh, don’t worry. He’s just weird” (meant in a humorous/eccentric way). It doesn’t worry me. We know what we’re missing...