So it’s been creeping up on me for a while. First an hour here, twenty minutes there, a three-hour relaxofest there… and I had a full blown case of television addiction. They talk about couch potatoes and being glued to the box – well I’m a sack of spuds that fell off a truck into a vat of PVA in a box factory, baby.
I’ve been muttering for years that I watch too much television but it really only hit me yesterday when I was impatiently waiting for my husband to stop talking so that I could watch Neighbours. NEIGHBOURS. Oh the crying shame.
The time has come for an intervention. I’m going TV cold turkey. I decided this about eight hours ago and I’ve only broken the ban once and it really was a minor infraction since I wasn’t the one who turned it on and it was the news, after all.
Anyway, I’m going to make a go of it for a week. DVDs will be permitted or else we might all get the jitters but to stay in the spirit of things those will be seriously limited for, like, emergencies. And I’m not sure if I’ll make it through the morning without News Breakfast on ABC2 but that’s pretty much the All Bran of breakfast TV so it’s allowed. Right?
So to report on all the little jobs I’ve suddenly found the time to do and how clearing my brain of one source of demeaning images of women has inspired me, I’ll be back at some point. (Let’s face it, I’ll probably be back pretty soon, since I’ll be so very, very bored… )
hehehe, good luck with that. My TV addiction has been cured by my sons TV addiction! If the TV is on it is ABC kids only. Now I have to tackle my blog addiction…
Isn’t the first step something like admitting you’ve got a problem? So, hey, you can cross one of them off. Not sure what the rest of them are, but if they’re as easy as the first one, you’ve got it nailed.
I don’t have a book addiction, it’s more like book compulsion. If I start a novel, I can’t really function as a normal person until I’ve finished it. (Unless it’s a bad novel, of course, and I can toss it away.) But once it’s done, I’m free of the evil power of fiction. Until the next time.
Well done (a) recognising it and (b) taking action. I hate the feeling that i’ve wasted any time at all (not counting relaxation – chilling is a seriously important use of time), and tv is one of the multitude of trivia-distracting enemies in modern life. I’m worse with the internet than tv, myself.
Good luck. I once had to do the same. I realised I was watching way too much, so just stopped cold. It only lasted a week or so, but I found other things to do and now I don’t watch as much.
There is something so soothing about slothing out on the couch with the tv turned on and your brain turned off. It can be a bit too soothing and I suppose that’s when it becomes dangerous…!