It is day six since I gave up Diet Coke (BTW, that post drew a record number of comments here!). I’ve been drinking iced tea, so I haven’t wound up with a major caffeine headache.

Anyways, so far so good. The jury is still out, as this habit is one that’s proven tough to stick with over the long term.

Interesting that it turns out that this week is TV turnoff week. Well, maybe next year. I think I can only handle one “addiction” at a time.

Seriously, for me, watching too much TV and overeating is like a chicken and the egg kind of thing. I’m not sure which came first. And I’m pretty sure that it isn’t a good thing that I TiVo five and a half hours of programming every day (in order, Ellen, Starting Over, Dr. Phil, Oprah, The Daily Show, and Countdown) before you add in the weekly programming (The Apprentice, Medium, Everwood, How I Met Your Mother, Gilmore Girls, American Idol–Tuesday’s only, Scrubs, My Name is Earl, Desperate Housewives, Grey’s Anatomy and liberal amounts of Bravo and FoodTV).

Yikes. I do have a problem!

Now of course, the great thing about TiVo is that you can fast forward. And more often than not, I’ll just delete an entire episode of stuff like Dr. Phil or Oprah because it’s just not that interesting to me.

And I’m also the queen of multi-tasking, so more often than not I’m working on the computer or reading while a program is on. However, the older I get, the more I’m finding that this isn’t generally satisfactory unless it’s something like American Idol, where it’s fine to just listen.

But maybe this is more of a problem than I thought. Check out what Robert Kubey and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pdf) had to say a few years back:

As one might expect, people who were watching TV when we beeped them reported feeling relaxed and passive. The EEG studies similarly show less mental stimulation, as measured by alpha brain-wave production, during viewing than during reading.

What is more surprising is that the sense of relaxation ends when the set is turned off, but the feelings of passivity and lowered alertness continue. Survey participants commonly reflect that television has somehow absorbed or sucked out their energy, leaving them depleted. They say they have more difficulty concentrating after viewing than before. In contrast, they rarely indicate such difficulty after reading.

Okay, yeah, lots of doom and gloom. But I half suspect that there is related phenomenon going on at the brain level with both kinds of excesses.

But whatever the mechanism, isn’t TV really just like food? You can say there is no “bad” or “good” TV (or food), but in reality, I guess quality is just as much an issue with TV as it is with food. And the quality of our lives–the amount of energy we have–depends on the quality of our “inputs.”

It’s beginning to occur to me that part of why I’ve used food, drink, Diet Coke, and TV is that it helps me go on auto-pilot. It’s not that I don’t have future plans (for example, right now I’m thinking about doing yet more graduate school). But I don’t know what I want for myself. I don’t know where to begin in terms of making some major life decisions like: buy a house or a condo (or neither)? Stay single, get married, have lots of flings with all sorts of people? Stay in DC or move?

I think that one of the ideas that makes sense is that in order to get the answers to these kinds of questions you have to get quiet. This is one of the attractions meditation has for me. Yet I don’t do it (though I like the idea of Eknath Easwaran’s Eight Point Program a lot).

One of these days, I’m going to become more conscious about my TV watching. But I think that part of it will involve figuring out what it is I really want to do with my life.