Bad Effects Of Watching Too Much Television

Television still takes an important place among the amenities of our modern life. Being born as a scientific discovery of photoconductivity and image scanning in the end of the XIX century, it turned into a huge monster, which captured minds and souls of billions of people around the earth. Modern television plays significant role in implementing various social, cultural, propagandist and even military objectives. For many people television is still the primary source for receiving all the information, which can satisfy their needs as social individuals. In addition, television provides us with perfect entertainment for any taste, starting with cartoons and ending with action movies. All these positive factors advantage constant increase of TV viewership and encourage people to spend more time in front of the TV sets. Often this results in television abuse and addiction, which usually cause numerous harmful consequences and can seriously damage people’s health and life style.

The first and the most dangerous effect of watching too much of television is mass physical degradation in our society. People, who spend hours and hours in front of the TV sets, are under very high risk of becoming overweight and obese. At that, television works for putting on weight from two different directions: it considerably reduces physical activity of obsessive TV viewers, and, at the same time, promotes unhealthy eating choices, like the foodstuffs with high content of sugar and fat, etc. Also, it is very common to snack excessively or to drink a lot of beer when watching some exciting programs, like sports, different competitions or thrillers. Therefore, supported with the models of extreme alcohol consumption in different TV shows and movies, television encourages drinking, especially among the teenagers and adolescents. That is why obsession with watching TV can cause some dangerous addictions.

The other group of effects, which can be caused by watching too much of television, is connected with possible mental disorders or disturbances. The most spread of those are attention deficit disorder and other problems with emotional health. In addition, obsessive TV watchers frequently feel so called exhaustion of the orientation response, which results in constant feeling of tiresome and weariness. Bringing the effects of relaxation into our minds, television actually disturbs human brain and makes it tired even within the first minutes of TV watching session. Recent researches discovered that television slows down our thinking. Also, image and color flickering affects human vision and, especially, functioning of heart, because the frequencies of such flickering can correspond to the frequencies of the heartbeat or to some electrical frequencies, which support functioning of human heart and brain. Resonance of such frequencies is especially dangerous for a human organism.

Other very common problems of those people, who watch too much of television, is lack of concentration, insomnia, restlessness, depressive thoughts, etc. Obsessive watching TV steals the time to be spent for many other important activities, like reading, cleaning the house, traveling, going to cinemas or theaters, and so on. Children are especially affected by the negative sides of watching television (like seeing violence or sexual abuse, etc) because of their unformed psychology and organism, in general. Modern television ruthlessly damages the development of aesthetic sensibility of a child and his imagination about the beauty. This can result in wrong perception of the life and its realities. The most common reactions of children on TV dependence are imitation of caddish or aggressive behaviors from TV, failures in schools and low grades, slow-down in intellectual development, lack of social skills, and others.

copied from API Healthline