Who wants to study when you can watch TV?
I went home after the last day of classes in order to spend some time with my family. It was probably the most relaxing six days I’ve had since this school year began. My two younger brothers and I put up the Christmas decorations around the house — we do it every year together; it’s a family thing. My only problem was that I barely studied and I had two exams this past Monday. It’s difficult to manage my time between family and school, especially when I barely get to see everyone. I think, though, that my greatest weakness was the television. My dad recently ordered more channels from our service provider, so we get the really great shows that I was only able to watch at friends’ houses before now. My week was spent either with my siblings or by myself on the couch watching television, so it’d be needless to mention my books collecting dust in the corner of my bedroom.
When I moved to Kitchener for school, my roommate thought about the cost of television because that’s something we both find ourselves becoming extremely distracted with. To skip the whole conversation part of the story, we decided to only pay for Internet and leave cable out of it. Surprisingly, we didn’t go crazy. Not having television allowed us to keep our heads in our books, but I think that it may have done a bit more than that — and the “bit more” is definitely not a great thing. Though television, as we all know, can be tremendously distracting, it can also be a bit of a stress reliever.
When I was in high school and living at home, I had never found the television to be a distraction. Maybe it was because cable has been something that was always there, so I was used to it. Whatever the reason may be, I had never found myself to be disrupted by television. Now, however, it’s as if I’ve lived without cable my whole life and I’ve just been introduced to it. Simply looking at the way my new lifestyle has affected me, I really believe that people need some sort of entertainment to de-stress them every once in a while.
According to an article in the magazine, “Success: From Home” author Snowden McFall said, “Creative expression is a fantastic stress reliever because it keeps you in the present moment.” My thoughts about needing something for relieving stress are of course not only a reference to television or video games. I feel that everyone should do the one thing they like or have a passion for every once in a while. Even just sitting down to watch TV or a movie is a great way to relax.
University is extremely demanding and seeing how hard we all work to do well, it’s also important to take a break, to keep our minds from the inevitable overload that will happen if we don’t get that little bit of “me time” every so often. That’s not to say that anyone should spend more time relaxing than studying, it’s more like a reward for ourselves to relax when we do well on an assignment, test or exam. Because the difficulty of managing time is already more than a lot of us can bear, I think we should all be rewarded after a few days, weeks, or months of stress. That way, we don’t all end up like me — glued to the television after five days of studying.