Every few months, someone asks me about screen time and their children.  The question is usually related to video gaming.  However, watching television also shifts brain-wave function.

If you’ve ever sat down in the evening to watch just a little bit of television, only to emerge from a trance-like state hours later and chalk it up to fatigue after a long day, you’re not alone.  However, that sense of fatigue and inertia comes from the television itself.  All screens refresh themselves several times per second, creating a flicker.  This flicker of the television is a form of entrainment, or forcing the brain into a different electrical pattern.

Since the late 1960s, we have known that this entrainment very quickly shifts a person from an alert, beta state into a daydreamy or meditative alpha state. That meditative state makes it hard to get up from watching television and do the next thing you planned to do with your day.  It’s not just you feeling lazy; it’s your brain downshifted.  It’s just one more reason, on top of studies showing a correlation between hours of television watched and negative health impacts, to monitor and perhaps reduce the number of hours a day watching television.

Here is an interesting article from a woman who gave up television altogether for a month.  It’s not a journal article, but the author’s experience is interesting, and her writing is an easy read.