Why We Ditched the TV in Our Main Living Areas (It’s Not Why You Think!)
Habits are crazy things. I don’t even think about how I brush my hair the same exact way every day or how I wash dishes. It is just something I do mechanically on autopilot. I know what I am doing, I have my routine, and I can just do it. Pretty much no thought or effort required.
Routine Frustrations
Habits are hard things too. They can be something good or something bad. For instance, my husband and I have a really bad habit of munching on food all evening long if it is reasonably easy to reach. So if we sit in a place where food is easy to access, guess what? We munch all night long.
For any of you of you that has ever had a bad habit to break, you will know the power of routine over your own desire to change. You can do so much to change habits but one misstep and you are back in the old rut quicker than a snap of the finger. And, if you are anything like me, that leads to a bad cycle of try, get frustrated, fail, and give up.
My husband and I are TV-aholics. When in doubt, we find it easiest to just sit and veg out in front of Netflix for hours on end. At first, we didn’t even try to fight the urge. However, after our first year of marriage and some serious weight gain (not to mention frustration with nothing good to watch on Netflix after so many hours of watching!) we decided something had to change.
The Problem of Too Much Access
When we bought our first home four years ago, we set our TV up in the living room upstairs. Now our house has a giant living room/dining room open space with great lighting. We loved the open layout however, our TV being placed in direct line of sight of our dining room soon poised an issue. We could watch TV pretty much non-stop while eating non-stop.
When Nick would get home from work, we would instantly collapse onto the couch and eat supper in front of the TV. If we felt formal, we would watch the TV from our dining room table. I will let you imagine how quickly downhill our eating habits became. We rarely found ourselves just sitting around visiting about our days or books we had read or anything really. And since the TV was so conveniently placed, we never bothered to meander away to read a book or practice piano or take a walk or anything. It was pretty bad.
The Power of Habit
For a while, we tried to just use sheer willpower to stop the bad habits we had created but whenever we had even the slightest bit of hard day or a change in schedule (which seemed to happen at least twice a week) we found ourselves right back into the rut of vegging non-stop in front of our TV. Oh and binge eating junk foods. After months of this frustrating cycle of failure to create better habits, we knew a more drastic change was going to be necessary if we didn’t want to weigh 500 pounds and be dead of heart attacks before 30.
The Decision for Change
After deliberating, our decision was to use our weaknesses against ourselves to create new habits. You know the saying that water always follows the easiest route. Well, especially come evenings, we are lazy and pretty much like water. We follow the easiest route. That route led straight to binge watching TV and eating junk food. The easiest route had to be changed for our bad habit to change.
We have a little family room downstairs. It is the only room in our basement that is completely finished. One half of the family room is dedicated to our numerous bookshelves that house all of our collective family library of books. It’s our little dream corner. (Best of all, our books are out of direct sunlight!) So we moved our TV down to the other half of that family room nook, put a couple of our less pretty and more uncomfortable recliners down there and called it good.
The Change for the Better
The change was almost instant. First, we have to go up and down stairs to even get to the TV. We are lazy people. This means that if we do go down, we stay down there, no twenty five runs to the pantry to get more goodies to snack. Also, with both the TV and snacks never in direct sight, we rarely are as tempted to indulge in both to great excess. Of course, we still love to munch a couple of treats but it never is to the gluttonous insanity it was before.
Plus, we watch TV for shorter amounts of time now. Why? Well, just seeing our books sitting right there makes us more likely to turn off the TV and read. Also, most evenings we never even make it down there because we find ourselves lingering in long conversations at the dinner table or resting quietly in the living room with our daughter while we read or play quietly. The path of least resistance makes it incredibly simple to just skip watching TV at all.
The Desired Effects
Many people probably think we are crazy but this simple change in the layout of our house has caused several desired effects, many that we never could have predicted.
First, the change caused a drastic increase of positive communication and quality time within our marriage. Without the noise of the TV always there, we soon found our relationship as a couple deepening again on a daily basis. Conversations are more naturally started in the quiet over dinner and continued throughout the course of the evening.
Second, it helped us feel better about ourselves since we were able to say no to temptations that plague us often at the end of our busy days. It’s great to know that basic changes could lead to results such as more exercise and less unhealthy snacking!
Third, the number of books we read increased rapidly. We love reading as a couple. It is one of the main interests that we have shared since day one of our relationship. The fact that TV was getting in the way of that was frustrating! Once we saw our completed book totals rising on Goodreads again, we knew that we had definitely made the right decision of moving the TV out of our main living area.
Finally, and this is the best one (and most unexpected one), our home became a much calmer, more inviting space. There is no TV constantly blaring its noisy messages at us. There was less TV-related “stuff” like DVDS, video games, and remotes cluttering every inch of our living area. It made walking in our front door a much less chaotic, frustrating scene. (At least when our toddler’s toys aren’t strewn everywhere-sigh-that’s the next thing we get to work on!) Overall, everything just took on a sense of peace-it made our home feel much more like a little piece of heaven on Earth and who wouldn’t want that?!
Your Turn
What about you? What challenging habit do you have that you are trying to break?
Prayerfully consider what God might have you change to bring about the better habits and situations that you desire. I would love to hear the results in the comments below!
Thanks for stopping by!
