Watching Happy TV / Marco Lanzarote

If you like to watch TV you may find some recent research in Psychologies Magazine interesting. The University of Maryland article called “The Mind Experiment” reported that people who watched TV for 18.9 hours per week were happier than those who averaged 25 hours per week.

The unhappy viewers were not as satisfied “with their financial situation”, “felt less safe, trusted others less” and thought they were less active socially than their peers, who were more happy after viewing TV less. The average Brit watches around 4 hours of TV each day. The collective total is around 455 million hours per year.

Using programmes as a topic for discussion, watching comedy or music programmes tend to make people happier than people who allow the TV to dictate what they watch.

This research was in an article by Martha Roberts, an award winning UK health writer and mental health blogger at mentalhealthwise.com