I was pretty scared at the beginning of the week, since my normal after-class routine involves laying in a comatose state on my bed while watching a few episodes of Brooklyn 99 or Parks & Rec. I thought my dreams would be haunted by the distant piano keys from The Office theme song and pictures of Blaire Waldorf looking down at me in shame. Yes, I had seen all of the *scary* facts about binge watching: it worsens your eyesight, disrupts your sleeping patterns, blah, blah, blah… I honestly couldn’t care less because nothing could separate me from my love affair with bingeing shows; well, nothing except an experimental article for Her Campus, that is. I thought this week would suck, I thought I would be stressed or bored or dying from quitting the blue-screen cold-turkey… Only time would tell if I could survive this torture or not…
I began the week thinking that I would have so much free time that I wouldn’t know what to do with it. Wrong! The Netflix-gap was quickly filled with studying, studying, and (you guessed it) more studying. I focused on my classes and even wore my nerdy glasses (so you know I was serious about it). I did anything I could to get ahead and make it out of this week alive.
However, by Tuesday, I just couldn’t study anymore. My ADHD was getting the better of me, and my mind kept wandering off into any other place it could while studying for my history of fashion class: Okay, okay, a reticule is a small purse worn by women in the 1800s to hold coins, it was new in fashion… I guess you could say it was reti-cool, amiright? I should tweet that. Wait, no, stop it Becky that’s not funny… Oh well, I made it to Twitter, might as well scroll through and make sure I haven’t missed anything interesting… And about two hours later, I found myself too-many-tweets-deep into my newsfeed, with my fashion textbook gathering dust next to me. It’s safe to say the ‘studying life’ definitely is not for me… Especially when I forget to take my ADHD meds…
I had to come up with other things to do rather than sit with my face buried in a computer screen for hours, so I decided to avoid Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and any other social media site that could easily capture my attention through cat videos and politically-incorrect status updates… So what did I do? I went to the gym [insert 90s live TV audience gasp]. I focused on putting my mind onto other, healthier things. I could go to the gym, blast my music and let my mind wander wherever it wanted to while sprinting on the treadmill (okay, less ‘sprinting’ and more ‘walking at a slightly fast pace’). Working out for half an hour made me feel so much more accomplished than binge-watching a TV show (well, besides the feeling that my insides were dying and my vision was being clouded with black spots… I hate cardio). When I got back to my apartment, I made a smoothie and congratulated myself on the fine accomplishment of being somewhat healthy for one day in a row*.
A few cardio-induced-dying day later, I decided to do something without the use of electronics before I went to sleep, and since I definitely wasn’t going to open that fashion textbook (since we all know how far down that rabbit hole goes), I decided to read a book for leisure (you know, that thing that old people do while sitting on rocking chairs on the front porch?). I could read at my own pace, not worrying about annotations or remembering tiny details for tests… Life was grand. I then fell asleep around 9pm. This, my friend, is the height of living.
I guess my point is, it’s amazing what you can do when you take a distracting element such as Netflix or Hulu out of your life. You start doing things that actually improve yourself: your studies, your health, even your mental state. No, I haven’t cut streaming out of my life, but I definitely scaled it back. This week proved to me just how much I suck at cardio and studying… oh yeah, and just how much you can do for yourself in those two hours of binge-watching The Office.
*Adding the in-a-row makes it seem like a lot more satisfying; don’t judge me, we all do what we can to feel accomplished.
Thumbnail by Jens Kreuter on Unsplash.