SUZANNE TATE: Are You Hooked?  Watching TV Can Become Addictive

An extensive study has discovered what your mom was trying to tell you for years – shutting off the TV is better for you and could even make you happier.

The University of Maryland analyzed 34 years of data collected from more than 45,000 participants and found that watching TV makes you feel good in the short term, but is more likely to lead to overall unhappiness. And unhappy people watch the most TV, while people who consider themselves happy spend more time socializing and reading.

“The pattern for daily TV use is particularly dramatic, with ‘not happy’ people estimating over 30 percent more TV hours per day than ‘very happy’ people,” the study says. “Television viewing is a pleasurable enough activity with no lasting benefit, and it pushes aside time spent in other activities – ones that might be less immediately pleasurable, but that would provide long-term benefits in one’s condition. In other words, TV does cause people to be less happy.”

The study, published in the December issue of Social Indicators Research, analyzed data from thousands of people who recorded their daily activities in diaries over the course of several decades.

Researchers found that activities such as sex, reading and socializing correlated with the highest levels of overall happiness.

Watching TV, on the other hand, was the only activity that had a direct correlation with unhappiness.

Brace yourself, TV addicts, the reasoning behind the findings is pretty blunt.

“TV is not judgmental nor difficult, so people with few social skills or resources for other activities can engage in it,” says the study.

“Furthermore, chronic unhappiness can be socially and personally debilitating and can interfere with work and most social and personal activities, but even the unhappiest people can click a remote and be passively entertained by a TV. In other words, the causal order is reversed for people who watch television; unhappiness leads to television viewing.”

In other words, if you are alive and your thumb works, you can click the remote and entertain yourself.

TV won’t challenge you, question you or engage you. It’s passive entertainment for the masses. It doesn’t even care if you fall asleep.

So it stands to reason it’s also a favorite pastime in unhappy marriages. Happily married couples “engage in 30 percent more sex, and they attend religious services more and read newspapers on more days,” reports the study. “While those not happy with their marriages watch more TV.”

That’s not really a surprise: Unhappily married couples are not likely to be romantic with each other. Watching TV is an easy crutch that is always there, just click the remote.

And study co-author John P. Robinson said the worsening economy could boost TV viewing.

“Through good and bad economic times, our diary studies have consistently found that work is the major activity correlate of higher TV viewing hours,” Robinson said in a release. “As people have progressively more time on their hands, viewing hours increase.”

Most troubling is how TV-watching patterns mirror addictive behaviors. The more you watch, the more you want and, ultimately, the more empty you feel.

The study concludes: “These points have parallels with addiction; since addictive activities produce momentary pleasure but long-term misery and regret. People most vulnerable to addiction tend to be socially or personally disadvantaged, with TV becoming an opiate.”

Remember your parents urging you to shut off the TV and go do something productive? Read a book. Go visit a friend. Get outside.

They were right.

Suzanne Tate is the opinion page editor at the Bristol Herald Courier and can be reached at (276) 645-2534 or .