Giving Up TV for a Month Changed My Brain | Hacker News Reader

Giving Up TV for a Month Changed My Brain

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88 pointsartsandsci78 comments

During the first few days we were at a loss for what to do. It had been our routine to watch whatever is on TV after dinner, and suddenly we were both dumbstruck for ideas. So we went to sleep at 8:30 p.m.

Two things about this confuse me.

1) Running out of "stuff" to do. Maybe it's because it's been literal years since I've watched scheduled programming and don't understand the habits involved anymore, but I can't understand this idea of not knowing what to do with free time. We watch what's likely way too much TV on some days, but all the things they "discovered" they could do with all this time are still things we do regularly, without cutting off the TV entirely.

2) How do people just "go to bed" early because they get bored? I'm actually jealous of that idea. If I just decided to "go to bed" early, it would most likely involve me staring at either the ceiling, my phone, or a book for a few hours.

It works surprisingly well. But only if you're actually bored.

If you'd rather be doing something, then you'll keep thinking about that until you stands up again.

It only happens to me if I'm in a depressed phase or sleep deprived without really noticing it.

Not really enviable though, tbh. It does not feel good (at least for me)

> Running out of "stuff" to do.

This happens to me after about 2-3 weeks of crunch time; I’ll have replaced my normal habits with working, and there’s a confusion when there’s suddenly no more work to do.

This is what I hate about "crunch time". I keep a priority list of my personal goals/tasks so I have perspective when I'm thinking of pulling another 60h week.

Reminding yourself that crunch time shouldn't be a regular recurrence is a good thing.

Repeat after me: I am an outlier, therefore my outcomes should also be outliers.

It's a bit self-indulgent but I've found it increasingly true the more I relate to, erm, non-outliers.

This is good advice, but the question here is who's the outlier. I had the same reaction and I'm pretty sure just about everyone I know would too. Or perhaps the point I'm missing is that everyone should assume that everyone, including themselves, is an outlier.

I wonder if age has anything to do with it. As I've gotten older, not only has the idea of being bored evaporated, but the idea of other people feeling bored is borderline offensive. Life is short, time is precious, there's always a zillion more things that could be done (maybe productive things, or maybe just fun time-wasting things) than there is ever time to do those things. And then someday it's all over. I associate being bored with when I was a little kid, or even when I was in my 20s and it still felt like my whole life was ahead of me. When you've convinced yourself that your whole life is ahead of you, time feels a lot less precious.

Perhaps you live in a bubble of remarkable people.

Try listening to conversations between coworkers, people in coffee shops, and at the grocery checkout.

Most people operate their lives like a smartphone has conditioned them to: never pull relevant information, only receive what's pushed.

You just captured my feelings exactly. As I get older it's not about finding something to do - it's about filtering down on the things I want to try and do.

As a 4-months-to-40 person and I know they are tropes but hiking, exploring wilderness, learning survival techniques, building things from wood, inventing strange useful objects and growing food and many other things are up my alley these days.

What I would do as a kid if I was bored are all things I can't stand anymore: Going to an amusement park, a movie, playing or watching sports, anything generally involving a lot of seeing or working with humans... hearing screaming kids, listening to music (especially if it's forced upon my ears without my ability to stop it), smelling perfumes... oh gawd keep it away.

I'm also curious if I'm an outlier at my age (or beyond?)

As I've gotten older, not only has the idea of being bored evaporated, but the idea of other people feeling bored is borderline offensive.

As long as we're batting the n=1 ball back and forth, I have the opposite reaction to you. When I was young and an arrogant go-getter, I found the idea of other people being bored, or unproductive, or non-curious to be offensive.

Sometimes I was tactful about it, but that's how I felt, especially when I was consuming a large diet of hagiographies describing successful people as burning the entire candle factory, not just burning the candle at both ends.

Then I obtained two important and (for me) correlated things: Life experience. And empathy.

The former has shown me that I was the outlier. The latter has shown me that these are good and worthy people, they're just good and worthy in ways that my former Cult of Productivity does not value.

And even if I am still interested in productivity and so forth, empathy has helped me see them as they are without judging them.

Boredom is a state of mind, no surprise it can be viewed differently from person to person. For me personally, boredom allows me time to reflect and meditate. I don't mind it.

One thing I realized about this is that when I was younger, I had a million ideas of what to do, but most of them were out of reach. I either didn't have the necessary knowledge, the necessary skill, or the finances to do the things I thought up. Now that I'm older, I often have many of those things. So I'm a lot less bored than I used to be. In fact, I have to pick and choose like you say - there are more things I'm able to do than I have time for. I better do something meaningful (even if that's just watching a really moving show or reading a good book).

Re 2: They could if they were tired. TV keeps you up when you're tired. If you don't have it to do, then you may find out how tired you are.

And boredom and tiredness are somewhat related. "Bored" could be "everything I might do takes too much energy to be worth it". There's a component of "tired" in there.

There is something to that. Not that TV as such has really been a draw for me, but screen time (including just surfing the Web) is. When I'm with relatives that still don't have broadband, I do tend to go to bed early -- not because I'm "bored" as such, but because I don't have something else competing with being tired.

Well, maybe they had sex but didn't want to put that in the article.

>1) Running out of "stuff" to do. Maybe it's because it's been literal years since I've watched scheduled programming and don't understand the habits involved anymore, but I can't understand this idea of not knowing what to do with free time.

I'm jealous. I usually pop open my laptop and burn through the hours until it's time to sleep. I wish I knew what to do with my free time more often.

This one I empathize with 100%.

2) Drugs. This has been my number one use for cannabis. If I need to go to sleep early for what ever reason, I smoke a bowl, lie down, and am out in no time.

A large glass of chocolate milk works for me.

I sometimes send myself to bed early if I’m in a poor mood and see it descending into a mental breakdown, especially when it’s getting towards the part of the evening where being tired and energised makes things worse. And I will always make sure to get an earlier start out of it.

This is more of a coping mechanism for depression than getting bored though. I kind of understand boredom less and less over the years, most of the times I’m really just feeling lethargic or demotivated and wishing there was _something_ I could do, rather than feeling like there’s nothing to do.

There is _always_ something to do. It’s just a matter of being interested or bothered.

> 2) How do people just "go to bed" early because they get bored? I'm actually jealous of that idea. If I just decided to "go to bed" early, it would most likely involve me staring at either the ceiling, my phone, or a book for a few hours.

I did a no electronics and no electric light after sundown thing for a couple weeks. Lived after-dark hours by a couple candles—found two beeswax tapers are about the smallest amount I could comfortably read by, assuming they were close, though unshaded looking at them directly by accident and being blinded/feeling eye-pain was a real problem. Beeswax because once you notice how chemical-spill-smelling the cheap parafin ones are you can't un-notice it.

I went to bed way earlier than I would have otherwise, during that time, and generally much better rested than usual. I think it was a combination of the lower light and the lack of hyperstimulation from having a world of audio-visual, passive and interactive, entertainment at my fingertips. I'd usually read for a while then turn in, not because there wasn't more I could do (there's always more to read) but because it was just time to sleep and because I didn't have a friggin' carnival going on in my house I actually felt that.

I'd thought my whole life I was a night owl, but now I'm pretty sure 90%—or more—of the "I just can't sleep at night, it's how I am" stuff you read on here and other places on the Web is the same problem I (actually) had/have: our houses are friggin' amusement parks complete with incredibly bright lights, so we're constantly hyper-entertained and hyper-distracted. Of course we can't sleep! We've got more and better entertainment than a damn Emperor's celebratory feast would've in yester-year—with the relative plenty in food and drink to match, I might add, should we desire it—and it's on tap, in our homes, 24/7.

Also, many device screens and light bulbs have daylight color temperature which can disrupt melatonin. It's amazing how blue LEDs are built into everything.

I wish some of the smart bulbs makers would get rid of their fancy mood lighting colors and make a light bulb that automatically adjusts its color temperature and brightness with the sun (or at least an ideal sun cycle if you don't want to go to bed at 5pm in the winter, or live in Alaska).

I already do this with hue white LED bulbs and timers in the app. I love how the blue mid day light looks like natural sunlight, and in the evening it's a nice warm glow. I have it fade to dark between 9pm and midnight, so I know it's time to go to bed when it starts getting difficult to see things.

Do you think a dim led tea light in a dark colored glass container would work similarly?

Probably would.

Again, I think the light was only part of it, the rest being that you're very limited in what you can do without electronics. Even if you make an exception for, say, putting on an album to listen to and then not messing with it (no skipping around or browsing music on a screen) there's still not a ton. And what's left might be lots of fun—you can board game in low light, certainly, and toss maybe ten candles around the room and you could play card games just fine, you can read sheet music and see well enough to play an instrument, you can write, and so on—but none of it's the kind of sensory assault of watching TV/Youtube/whatever or playing a video game is. Reading or practicing your scales isn't in the same sleep-banishing league as inviting a world-class acting troupe into your house for the evening to put on any show you desire, ya know? Or having some kind of answer-any-question-you-think-up-on-a-whim (kinda, almost, as long as you don't dig too deep) oracle available. Which is basically what the modern Internet is—anything you want, any time, wall-to-wall world-class performances of anything you like, answers to whatever dumb trivia pops up in your head, at a button press. Every stupid nagging thought can take hold and drive you to action at any time because it's actionable. Powerful, sure, amazing, sure, but a good (healthy) idea to let it loose in your home at all hours? I think not.

I did try to find some sort of small desktop battery-powered incandescent nightlight for a while but all that stuff's LED now. Probably would be fine anyway, I just wanted the smooth and warm light frequency curve. May try the LED route some time, though even fairly weak ones are a hell of a lot brighter than two candles so you'd have to watch the wattage carefully to not end up with something that, in an otherwise dark house, is actually pretty damn bright.

You might try bedtime bulbs. They have a good spectrum and can be combined with dimmers.

Had similar experiences to you when going camping with no electricity. Feel asleep very early. I should try to replicate it at home. I do low lights but still use screens too much.

Blind person here. I actually wonder if audiobooks don't have similar effects, on some people at least. For a while, I used to read a lot of books, mostly not requiring much thinking. Lit RPG was my favorite genre). I mostly used to read ebooks with speech synthesis at ungodly speeds which I'm used to, so I could finish medium-sized books in a single day of binge reading. I remember having book marathons, which were not that dissimilar from watching a whole season of one show on Netflix in a day. I didn't have to exert much effort, I just used the continuous reading function of my screen reader and let it speak. Not going to sleep until very late at night just to know how that damn book will end is also no news for me. The fact that there are no real breaks between parts, as in show episodes, makes it even worse. Sure, there are chapters, but switching between them in audiobooks is automatic, instantaneous, and they're sometimes short enough that I don't even pay that much attention to it.

I sometimes watch TV shows with audio description, a special audio track overlaid on top of the normal one, with a narrator describing the visual aspects, and I don't enjoy them as much as books. That form of entertainment seems to require much more concentration and I'm often tempted to just stop. I think that for us blind people, the books vs shows thing may be completely reversed.

Since TV isn't intended to be listened to exclusively, it may just be a matter of the format not translating properly.

Have you tried radio plays? They aren't very popular in the US, but Britain seems to still make them. I'm curious if they are any better than your TV experience.

I tried, but I'm not a fan, mostly because the BBC's website is shitty as hell, and I can't be bothered. No one else really makes them, as it's wildly unprofitable, but BBC is runing on tax money, so they don't particularly care. I sometimes listen to dramatized versions of audiobooks. In my country, they're sometimes made, released commercially, and not abridged.

I love LitRPGs. It's like candy in book form. Almost no substance and my brain just turns off.

Totally. Digital equivalent of buttered popcorn.

this is always my killer argument in any "books versus TV" discussion. Not all books are educative and have qualities one would associate with literature.

I've often found that towards the end of the day, when my brain is tired, I don't have the energy to read (much less code or work). Yet I can stay up for another hour or two passively watching TV.

I suspect a lot of us are the same and we'd be happier and healthier had we just gone to sleep.

Like a recovering alcoholic who avoids going into places that serve alcohol, it's much, much easier just to get rid of all TVs from your house so the temptation just doesn't exist.

I think a lot of us now consume Netflix and other services on our smartphones and laptops.

Block it, then.

The phrase "watching TV" has lost all meaning.

If someone mindlessly flips channels all evening, watching hundreds of commercials and "whatever's on", I can see how that can be detrimental. For most of my life, that is what "watching TV" meant. I am amazed that anyone still does this.

But if someone watches a handful of shows they have selected that suit their particular taste, and then watch those shows at the time of their choosing and without commercials, the downside seems minimal. They are still "watching TV", I suppose, but it seems like an altogether different activity.

One summer I gave up watching TV (or video of any sort) for the summer and read 36 books in 3 months. I don't have summers off, so this was just an arbitrary period. I don't know if it changed my brain, but I remember thinking much clearer and feeling much more engaged with life. But how long can you go before rewatching the Office or catching up on Game of Thrones? We're all only human.

IMO that was reading, not lack of TV. Reading for me definitely changes my thinking, most obvious in that my inner dialog changes tone to match the author I'm currently reading. This is one of my favorite parts of reading and plays an big role in my choice favorite authors and books. On the other hand watching TV or not doesn't seem to have this or any other noticeable affect on my thinking other than a bit of content (or not).

I agree with this, and believe the positive changes will continue the longer people go without tv. I've been without cable for 8 years and I'm so much happier.

When I visit my parents they always watch tv after dinner, and while sitting with them I've noticed how terrible tv shows are. It's strange, but it's like once the spell was broken I could see it for what it is: contrived and unoriginal narratives designed to keep people's attention and get them to sit through commercials.

Can you imagine someone writing an article, "I gave up listening to music for a month and it changed my brain" and people having a positive reaction to it?

No, but if the title was instead "I gave up listening to [the top commercialized] music for a month and it changed my brain" I suspect it would receive a positive reaction.

I don't think it would.

Well that's food for thought isn't it? I don't really listen to music anyways, but one of those people who seems to need constant music in their life should try it and report the results.

I'm more or less one of those people. Working to music helps me because it keeps that hyperactive part of my brain that always wants to get detracted at bay. I will highlight that I normally just drop down into a playlist I have of all my music, or listen to an Artists discography.

I have had instances where I'm doing something that requires 100% of my brain power to solve, and just the extra bit of music becomes overwhelming. That's a twice a year type of issue though.

A slightly rephrased title could be "I gave up listening to music while working", and I'd agree with the general conclusion. I find that listening to music can interrupt my flow state during a 45 min Pomodoro. When the song changes, or when the playlist ends, I notice, and get distracted trying to choose a new album to put on.

That’s easily remedied though. Put playlist on repeat for example.

I doubt you would get a positive reaction because listening to music isn't considered a problem. There might be a lot of reasons for that, one of them might be that most people don't sit and exclusively listen to music.

As someone who can play 3 instruments (sax, guitar, percussion), TV & music are very different

Music is very actively engaging for me. Even listening to it, I tap and strum along. I even find myself “air fingering” to sax music. I primarily stick to unknowns, local acts, live shows on YouTube.

TV on the other hand just makes me feel numb and tired. With little exception I nothing from it. I read up on popular shows here and there, mostly on Wikipedia, just in case someone brings it up I can kind of follow along (same with movies).

Also when and where I grew up we had a clear public TV picture, and the CBS affiliate that barely came in. Perhaps my brain never developed enough of an interest.

Instruments are much cheaper and less environmentally destructive to make.

For me the benefits of sticking to music far out weigh TV

One thing that has worked really well in our lives is to not have the TV in the main living space. Our kitchen/living room are all open and there is no TV there.

To watch TV, we have a theater room. So it's an intentional act to go in and watch something, we don't just leave stuff on in the background.

Obviously being able to segregate this isn't possible for a lot of people's living spaces.. but it is really nice making it an intentional act. It's like my kids and their computers- we have a room for that. They don't have tablets. If they are going to play electronics, ok go there sit down and do it. But once you are somewhere else like the living room that is for reading/talking etc, not for sitting on a tablet.

That sounds pretty healthy. Can you share how often the living room gets used for reading and talking? In most homes I see, these spaces go unused in favor of the TV room.

I was raised in a "single tv" household and I think it helped that we all had to compromise on what we wanted to watch. This was before laptops were common, so screens are much more ubiquitous now. However, during the 90s it was common for each bedroom to have its own TV.

Living room gets used every day. It's not tucked away, it's in the center of the house with the kitchen, so that I like as well.

It really is interesting how the layout of a home can really determine how you function in your life day to day!

Much has been written about TV being a passive stimulus for the brain with hypothesis being that the lack of active stimulus causes atrophy of the brain. Reading doesn't have the same effect because the brain has to actively process the written glyphs to language and abstract concept so there's more processing happening than when you're just watching something.

I've always thought that the the difference may actually be the reverse, in the fact that reading provides less information (and requires less input processing). The reader has to fill in all the gaps using their imagination, which seems like a more active mental process then the more "automatic" input processing even if such input processing may be more mentally complex. Arguably, you're actively processing much more information watching TV. Your brain is interpreting both sounds (usually a complex mix of language, music, and other natural and natural sounds), as well as as stream of rapidly changing and complex visual information. In both cases the viewer/reader still has to interpret and process the more abstract "story" elements, but in the case of the reader they are also constructing mental images/sounds/scenes as part of that process, as opposed to just consuming them. So while the TV viewer may be processing more information, they are doing so passively and their brain is mainly focusing on that passive automatic process. The reader is "exercising" their mental capabilities more as they have to fill in more gaps using their imaginations.

Does this at all depend on the type of show? I find when watching programming with a lot of ambiguity (mysteries, procedurals, etc) my brain is very active trying to anticipate or think back to connect dots to follow what's happening. Compare that to spectacle programming like sports/drama/reality shows where everything is happening onscreen.

I wonder also about foreign shows where you are forced to read while the action is in progress.

And then combine that: I can watch reality shows with my wife and feel no real change in energy, but then we watch something like "Dark" (subtitled and very mystery-box format) and I feel exhausted by the end of the episode.

That all makes sense. There are some kinds of TV/movies where viewing is more mentally engaging. Mysteries, deep sci-fi or documentaries, anything where you are imagining and/or trying to understand aspects outside of the audio-visual experience. I was mostly just saying that in broad strokes that the most passively consumed written story still requires some 'active' imagination, where-as viewing a lot of TV/movies does not seem to.

I think that depends on the viewer. e.g. One could watch tv news passively accepting everything as fact OR watch the news while trying to understand what the agenda of the news program is.

I find it strange that YouTube is only mentioned once in the whole article (about listening to an old radio programe). I am curious if YouTube was considered or not as a kind of TV during the experiment or not.

> No TV. No Netflix. No live streaming anything.

> we listened to CBS Radio Mystery Theater on YouTube, a radio program

I would assume they didn't watch anything on YouTube

No live streaming. I wonder if this is purposefully specific.

Honestly, what's wrong with being well rounded in your entertainment? So frequently there are articles plasters about how you must "give up" things like television.

I'm listening to an episode of How I Built This at work, will read some Game of Thrones on the way home, will watch Love Island with dinner and probably throw on a record as I get ready for bed. It's not an all or nothing game here, you can just enjoy life.

> Honestly, what's wrong with being well rounded in your entertainment?

Absolutely nothing. However, people are weird, and everybody is wired differently. Sometimes cutting out the thing completely is the only way someone can control themselves.

For instance, an alcoholic might not be able to moderate their drinking and abstinence may be the only way they can beat the addiction.

Similarly, someone who is addicted to television might not physically be able to moderate their television viewing, and it takes going cold turkey for a while for their brain to adjust and new habits to form.

I'd even go so far as to say that a large number of people addicted to television don't even realize that they're addicted to it. Over the last few decades it's become normalized and expected that Everyone (for varying definitions of 'everyone') has at least one television that's the center of their entertainment life, and every waking hour that they're home the television is turned on and tuned in to something. If it's not, then the person is weird because television is What You Do(tm) when you're home and not working.

Dam I just watched season 3 of Jessica Jones in one sitting, guess I'm fucked

On a scale of Luke Cage Season 1 to Daredevil Season 1, how good was Jessica Jones Season 3?

It depends on what you watch. For abstract concepts such as math and programming, I can sometimes learn faster or gain more complete knowledge by watching videos on a subject. Sometimes visuals that are in motion make it much easier to understand concepts that are very difficult to explain in human language. I believe the written word is ill suited for expressing a lot of information that is less tangible.

Videos are usually a good supplement to reading, at least for me.

I also don't regret spending time to watch a documentary or the news if my brain needs a rest after a work day. And some new knowledge is imparted on me.

I didn't watch television for 2 years. (I watched a movie on rare occasion, but that was the exception.) I read a lot during that time. It felt fantastic. I don't think I've ever had so much thinking space.

I still don't watch a lot of television. Occasionally a movie with my wife on the weekend. I'm pretty happy with it. :) Sure, there are other things I do that are probably a waste of time, but one step at a time.

After adulthood,I didn't get a tv until my late 20s. When I did get one,it really helped with "taking a break" from other things, with streaming I had to find content but with TV I just tune in without all that much care about the programming.

Although, I still haven't gotten cable,it's mostly streaming IPTV(sling.tv and pals)

YMMV

I gave up cable 10 years ago and I haven't looked back. I now have more time in the day to actually get things done.

I've given up TV for years. Having kids does that. The spare time I do have is in HN, Reddit, Google News etc... I'd like to reduce that, as most of the time it adds no value to life (except HN, sometimes)

This is absolutely true. I thought I was crazy when I cancelled my TV license here in the UK a year ago. But after several months, I wasn't missing out on anything.

I never felt more productive in getting things done.

Getting things done is overrated. You're just spending more of your pollution quota. Watching TV is remarkably low on CO2 emissions.

(I'm only half tongue-in-cheek)

I don't think there is any inherent virtue in not watching tv. People can do what they want in their leisure time and like anything else it can be enjoyed in moderation.

Is abstaining from conspicuous consumerism virtuous? If so, there is virtue to be gained by not exposing yourself to the incessant, persuasive, and obnoxious advertisements of television.

When I quit TV I stopped wanting/caring about having the newest/nicest model car (among other things), and gained contentment and peace of mind as a result.

TV shows, Movies, YouTube, etc. makes sense. Would you consider gaming to have the same effect?

Gaming is such a wide range of things though. There is considerable difference in how I use my brain for a party board game, versus a first person shooter, versus a DnD session, versus factorio, versus a story game like The Last of Us. Am I being social? creative? analytical? reactive? or just observing, which is what all those other things tend to be.

I think overall gaming has far better ROI than watching television. Of course if done in moderation and for entertainment purposes.

Soon we’ll start seeing similar results about podcasts.

By and large they’re an epidemic of passive entertainment that make people dumber (with many notable exceptions just like Tv)

> epidemic of passive entertainment that make people dumber

I'd be interested in hearing some evidence about this.

I've been listening to podcasts for about 12+ years. I doubt their effect is much different than reading magazines. There are so many to choose from that certainly the selection makes a significant difference in the outcome.

Certainly you can select dribble that simply enables you to parrot an opinion, but you can also select engaging shows that promote critical thinking and/or expand your knowledge of the world, business, and chosen skills.

Wish I could give up youtube.

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