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hey this is Leo for actualised dot-org and in this video I'm going to talk about how to stop watching TV television ten years ago if you would have asked me to shoot the video that I'm about to shoot what you're about to watch about television it would have blown my mind because where I was then compared to where I am now is so radically different and my views on television have really changed a lot this video even though it might sound like it's something very simple and very obvious you might have heard it many many times before don't dismiss what this video is going to show you because if you watch television the way that most Americans watch television nowadays which is multiple hours per day multiple week days per week accumulating up to 5 to 10 to 15 hours of TV time per week then actually this video right here might be the single biggest personal development gain that you can make in your life just by changing this one thing and stopping to watch TV I want to go into some of the details here about the challenges with TV and I also want to make some finer distinctions between what kind of TV TV is OK and what kind is not ok so let's crack into all that television is destroying your life pretty simple pretty simple statement and this is not a statement that I would have grete agreed with 10 years ago because I was so immersed in television I love my movies I love my video games I love my my TV shows I love my Discovery Channel my History Channel I love my TV news and watching all the politics and all the election cycle news all that stuff I was very much immersed in it not only that but in my own mind I was telling myself this is actually a positive thing because I knew back then that people were espousing theories about why TV is bad for you but I actually had counter theories to that in my mind and I'm saying actually TV is making me more worldly I'm seeing things on TV I'm learning stuff from the stuff that I see on TV that I wouldn't have otherwise learned by myself that this is helping me to become a more rounded human being of course the same time that TV was numbing my mind and creating a lot of other problems I want to get it to here in a second so the first thing that you have to start to realize about this this TV that you're watching if you're watching a lot of it is that your mind is going to trick you and it's going to get you to come up with all sorts of rationalizations for why this TV that you're watching is good for you right and you're gonna have theories you have all sorts of like counter points to make against even the suggestion that you should cut out TV entirely from your life and that is what I'm suggesting here in this video is to cut it out entirely I'm going to make a couple of minor adjustments to to that blanket statement but generally what we're talking about here is cutting it out entirely so how is television bad we have to really build a case for it because if you don't if you don't buy into this case that I'm about to make then you're not going to quit and see the challenge with television is that it's everywhere anywhere you go there's TVs even when you go nowadays to a restaurant there's a flat-screen TV on the wall even if you go to a hotel lobby there's a flat-screen TV I even go to my apartment to get my mail at the mail center there and there's a TV there playing movies and and news that kind of stuff and at the gym you see television screens so TV is everywhere and in your house you probably have many of them and they're probably always playing and so because of this there's this like social social and cultural momentum to be watching television so you have to kind of set some boundaries if you want to stop because if you don't set these boundaries deliberately consciously then you're just going to go along with the flow you're going to go with the crowd you're going to do what your friends are doing you're gonna do what your family's doing you're going to do what what people are doing at the gym or other places that you go to in public and you're going to watch that television that's just what's going to happen to you so we have to sort of build this case in your mind the first biggest thing that I see that's a big problem with television is how negative it makes you it makes you extremely negative it's funny because I watch the comments that are left on a lot of my videos on YouTube and one of the things that I see there is that people will respond with all sorts of like limiting beliefs about life or they'll espouse he's like very deeply negative theories about how miserable and horrible and brutal life is and I didn't realize this myself until I started getting into a lot of personal development you know going to seminars watching a lot of products listening to audio programs and you know smart people made smart points to me that I eventually caught on to which is that a lot of the negativity that your worldview has is simply the result of the cultural conditioning that you're inundated with through television as one of the primary sources I can guarantee you that a lot of the people who espouse these very negative views about life would think that life is very depressing or horrible that there's a lot of murder and rape and drugs and violence happening in life that the only reason this is if you think this way is simply because you watch a lot of TV if you didn't watch TV if you didn't watch cable news if you didn't listen to all the stuff that people are telling you like that in the media then there is no way that you would form a negative worldview like that in your own life just from personal experience not if you live in a first world country if you live in a in a reasonably good area in a first world country there's no way you would come to that conclusion but a lot of people are extremely negative in exactly those kinds of nice environments first world country nice neighborhood but you've got this negative view of the world why because you're watching so much goddamn television and the stuff that television is reporting to you is all biased what does it bias towards it's biased towards drama and like excitement and shock value that's really what TV is about that's what movies are about that's what TV news is about that's what a lot of shows and even documentaries which you would think would be objective and more even minded more scientific a lot of them are also about shock value simply the things that they're using to focus on even if they're reporting a case accurately simply the fact that they chose to focus on a rape or a theft or a robbery or a war or some sort of scam or a Ponzi scheme or some sort of government corruption just because the news is choosing to focus on these things that right there is already biasing you towards having this filter of the world as a negative place which is not at all but you might think that because you watch so much television a couple of other problems with TV it numbs your mind so even though you could say that through television you get to explore some of the world you get to see what people are like through television you get to learn about society through television there are some redeeming qualities there but the biggest problem is that you numb your mind as you're watching that TV and what that does is it just like it drains your motivation to live your own kind of life what I see happening and this is something that I was experiencing for a long time is that you start to get into this vicarious mode where you're living life through other people you're living life through your reality TV stars that you watch or through an HBO show or through even news or documentaries that's how you're living life you're not actually coming face to face with three-dimensional life the way you would if you put down the remote and shut off your cable but instead you're you're just like looking at this screen and you feel like you're living a real life but your life is actually very two-dimensional and until you start to go out there and travel and build an amazing career for yourself and get into amazing relationships and make friends with cool people and start earning money and creating success in in the real world for yourself then really you don't recognize how two-dimensional your life is so the numb the mind-numbing effects are really pernicious the next thing is that television promotes laziness this really goes along with the 9-month numbing effects but the laziness comes about because it's so easy to just sit down and plug into an easy source of stimulation the TV right you get home from work you're a little bit tired you just want to unwind and so you plug in and you stayed plugged in and do that day after day after day week and month after month after month and then go it goes into years what happens is that your your willpower muscles just kind of drain and it becomes very difficult to motivate yourself to go out there and do something big with your life that's actually going to require work and and discipline and some challenge to it right for example to be very difficult for you to go out and up there and start your own business because when you do go to start that business the first few obstacles are going to run into which was inevitable you will when you start a business they're immediately going to make you think like oh why am i doing all this work when I could just go sit from the TV and watch a nice comfortable show that I like isn't that the easier and more comfortable life why don't I just go do that why am i bothering building this this whole business thing it's too much work takes too much discipline there's all these challenges all this frustration all this stress and then you say to yourself ah you know what that can wait and you put it on the back burner and you waste year after year after year watching more of this TV so that's how promotes laziness the other thing that does is it really kills your schedule a lot of us these days we're very busy we live lives that are just inundated with all sorts of activity well television is what it's doing is it taking all that discretionary time that you have in your life which is actually pretty limited because after work and after showering and go to the bathroom a couple times a day and getting a couple of lunches and dinners pretty much your whole day is used up you only have about four or five hours of discretionary time per day at at most that you can use towards growing yourself or developing a business or improving in your career we're doing something positive for your life creating something positive with your life you don't have so much of that per day and every day that you waste an hour or two or even more watching television that's precious time that you're wasting and that's destroying your schedule it's really putting in a lot of filler in there that's just making you more frantic more stress and more overwhelmed because you have these grand goals for your life but you can't accomplish them with all your time is taken up by television the other way that it's bad is that advertising is rare fit through all television all of media basically the media is built to accommodate advertising shows are literally designed so that they fit in with it with advertising this is a really really dangerous thing and you don't presently realize this if you've been watching TV your whole life what I found is that once I weaned myself off of TV then the other thing that I got really sensitive to is how pernicious the advertising is I haven't watched cable television in in years now probably three or four years and one of the things that I see when I'm at the gym because we have TV monitors there I try not to look at them but sometimes I do is whenever I see an advertisement I'm very very sensitive to it it's almost freaky how sensitive I am because I'm simply not seeing them all the time but you see them so much if you're a regular TV watcher that to you you think like oh advertising and that's just nothing I'll just sit through it or maybe all even you know flip channels but the fact is that you're still catching those ads and those ads are dangerous because they're driving this kind of shallow consumers desire in you and they're also filling you up with just like this very stupid mind-numbing groupthink right TV makes you really soaked in groupthink which means that you're going to think like the general masses think and when you think like a general masses think then you expect easy results you expect money and fame and you think that some magic pill solution is going to come along and fix anything in your life and just like other other sorts of kind of groupthink like that when you're buying into that it's really difficult to then go do something extraordinary for life there's going to be such a huge disconnect there because just the philosophy of mainstream society is is completely anti mastery its anti anything creating great with your life it's anti that right it's just living a really humdrum 90 day kind of nine-to-five kind of existence and then spending the rest of your day kind of entertaining yourself being comfort mode being stuck there and then your life just stalls that's what that's about so that's very very dangerous and the last thing is that TV is really distracting you from your life purpose right what is it that you want to accomplish in your life what's the impact that you want your short existence on this earth to actually create you can't have a really serious life purpose and then to be spending even one or two hours a day watching television there's such a huge disconnect between that you really have to choose whether you want to have your life purpose and you want to be making a big difference contribution the world or you're watching TV doing all the stupid stuff that your friends do and all the stupid stuff that society tells you is easy to do right because having a purpose working on that having the kind of impact that you want growing yourself in order to live into that purpose to share your greatest gifts with the world that's very challenging that's difficult to do that's why I do so much personal development because I found that it's necessary in order for me to live out my greatest dreams and my greatest goals but I can't do that literally like right now in my day I'm always scrambling I have so much stuff to do if I was watching television there's no way I could even accomplish a fraction of it all right it's just totally taking me off my course breaking down my momentum taking that motivation and willpower that I'm putting into my life purpose if I watching TV the TV just kind of sucks all that out from under me so let's say a couple of distinctions here between television because I don't like using the blanket term TV there's too many different mediums out there nowadays that some of them are actually good some of them are really really bad so let's make some distinctions I think the worst thing that you definitely need to cut out with no questions asked is cable television right just cut out cable if you have cable if you have satellite that needs to be cut why because the problem with cable is that it's always there right it's just like constant source of comfort you can keep coming back to and keep coming back to and keep coming back to so it's when it's there at work or when it's there in your house or if you work at home and you have your own business that's extremely extremely damaging to you right to always go to that source so you want to cut that off so that even if you are watching movies here or there or you're catching glimpses of the TV at your friend's house or the gym you can't sit down and watch four hours of it which you inevitably will do if you have cable TV in your house so you gotta like snip that cord and just cancel it the next thing is DVDs I think DVDs are actually okay if you want to watch films you want to watch movies especially some of the class your films that are out there go ahead and do that I think that's fine just you know keep it keep it moderate keep it reasonable if you want to watch a couple of movies a week I think that's perfectly fine if you want to like entertain yourself with one of your favorite movies or a really high-quality movie I think that for movies actually you can gain good inspiration you can also gain creative ideas if you're a creative type of person and your career revolves around that you can get a lot of creative ideas from movies they can also move you emotionally they can stir you which are some of my favorite movies are the ones that kind of do that and they can also just give you kind of like an escape especially if you're working really really hard and you want to use a movie to get you some nice relaxation to get your your batteries recharged so you can go and hit hard get hit hard at work again the next day I think that's fine just as long as you don't go overboard with that stuff and what's nice with DVDs and remember this is DVDs or blu-rays this is different than something like Netflix because Netflix is again it's more like cable I'm going to get to Netflix in a second but DVDs are okay because usually you don't have access to an infinite number of DVDs you can't just sit there watch for hours of DVDs most the time you can actually get in there put it in your DVD player so that's a different dynamic right don't confuse this with Netflix let's let's talk about Netflix and other streaming services too so like Hulu Amazon video other kinds of streaming services I look at these as the same as cable TV they're in the same negative category this needs to be cut so if you have subscriptions for Netflix Hulu Amazon Prime whatever that kind of stuff is canceled and cut all that stuff because the problem is that it's too easy it's there right it's just there and it's waiting to drain your attention in life and it will trip you up and your willpower is not going to be strong enough to withhold from it all the time so even though you can use that for a while you can't use it all the time and what you really want to avoid are those like four or five hour marathon sessions where you just sit and veg out and your mind goes totally numb so get rid of those movie theaters I think movie theaters are fine if you go to the movies with your friends on Fridays Saturdays that kind of stuff that's fine usually because it's already expensive activity so you're not gonna be doing it too often usually you're not going to go more than once a week and you're actually there you're going out with your friends you're socializing so that's a bit of a different thing so movie theaters are not a problem what is the problem is YouTube right you're watching me on YouTube a lot of times and I think that there's a distinction that needs to be made you can you can watch YouTube but only watch it for educational material not entertainment material because it's so easy to waste hours and hours of your life watching funny YouTube videos and quite frankly almost all the most popular channels on YouTube virtually all of them are just like the most stupid mind-numbing like lowbrow entertainment that you could possibly find why are they the most popular channels simply because that's what people are drawn to the easiest that's the easiest thing to get drawn to because it's the most low consciousness thing it's like the most lowest common denominator and so if you're watching any of those kind of channels unsubscribe from those channels they commit with yourself not to watch anything funny or stupid on YouTube if you're going to use you to use it for educational type of information use it to watch documentaries use it to watch lectures and Ted videos like that kind of stuff that's more or less okay you don't want to go overboard with those either but those are miles ahead of like the mind-numbing that is 90% of what YouTube is so watch out for that porn I'm not really going to talk about porn in this video I'll show to dedicate a video about porn the bottom line is you know don't be too obsessed with porn think that's a problem for most people because you just can't watch too much of it it ultimately there's only so much of it you can watch it's not going to waste hours and hours of your day so my suggestion here is cut cable TV cut TV news cut TV shows cut stuff like Amazon and Netflix all the streaming services cut all of that stuff educational material is a different story so I actually use television nowadays mostly for education I'll use it to watch seminars self-help products lectures and and and like really high quality documentaries that kind of stuff I think is really really good so it's not about the screen the TV screen itself that's not what's kind of evil about television the TV screen itself can be used for a lot of good stuff right I literally have a hard drives terabytes of hard drives full of like amazing lectures from college professors and DVDs from various seminars like amazing self-help seminars like that kind of stuff that's life-changing stuff for me and if anything I need to do is watch more of that but that's a very different thing than the way that most people use television I feel I see very few people using television in this kind of educational way where I actually sit down i watch I pause it takes like detailed notes it's really like studying it's almost like being enrolled in like an online college kind of course so if you create that for yourself using your television or your your internet or your computer that's that's perfectly fine I think that's actually a really powerful way to grow yourself very quickly and YouTube could actually be part of that strategy I mean that's what I hope to do with my videos here is I hope that I can use these videos not to make you numb and to make you live vicariously through me and just to be feeding you with empty information but ultimately I hope that I give you all this information and you're actually going out there and implementing it on a daily basis right and eventually what's going to happen is that I hope that you actually wean yourself off of my videos eventually going to wean yourself off and your life is going to be so extraordinary it's going to be so three-dimensional that you're going to say screw that guy leo I don't need this channel I don't need these videos anymore I've got this stuff figured out I can go you know to higher sources of information like books and other plate and seminars and you know mentors and my friends and stuff like that and like learn really richly from that and live this extraordinary life in the 3d not in the Toodee so that's kind of where I hope you alternately get to but it may take take some time to do that so how do you actually go about cutting television cutting it out of your life it's difficult I remember the first time that I wanted to do this because I saw that it was important and I was trying to do it but I kept cutting TV and then falling back off cutting TV and falling back off and my biggest sticking point was that I was saying in my mind that way well television it's serving an important function in my life here's how my own mind was thinking it was saying look I worked really hard I've owned a business I'm earning some good money you know I'm working more than eight hours a day sometimes so I need a channel to relax I need a way for for my mind to just kind of like mellow out be chill and recharge my batteries and I'm really low on energy all the time so teeny helps me do that helps me relax otherwise I would say to myself I'd be working all the time and I would just burn myself out and so this was the excuse that I was using to stay plugged into television for a long time and I knew in the back of my mind that there might be other sources of relaxation out there for me other ways to relax and recharge my batteries other than television but I kept justifying in my mind and saying that well I try some of this stuff like reading books and I tried some of this stuff like you know going out for a walk or you know doing these kind of other activities and they just don't recharge me the way that TV does and that's true because right now you're hooked to TV like a drug and you probably don't even realize it so you have these withdrawal symptoms and they're very real I can remember right now my withdrawal symptoms about four years ago when I was getting off of cable they were they were they were difficult I would like tell myself no I'm not going to do it and then I would still turn the tv back on right and I would go maybe for a whole week not watching TV and that I'd be so tired for my work and so like beat up after working so hard that I'd be like ah I'm just gonna watch for an hour too and then I would sit down and I'm watching for five hours and then I would feel guilty about it so it's like this cycle that goes on and on it's very similar to to eating junk food right if you're if you I've ever done an emotional type of eating where you have a bad day that you eat a lot and then you feel like you'd like splurge and you just feel disgusting with yourself that's what TV starts to feel like after a while so here's how I did it I think the most important thing is that you have to you have to be honest with yourself and tell yourself that yes there's going to be withdrawal symptoms and it's not going to be a clean and easy break at first I think the biggest thing is to cut your streaming services cut your cable if you do that then it's gonna be difficult for you to engage in too much television already right there but of course you're still gonna have these withdrawal symptoms and you're going to feel like well now I have nothing to do with with this time I've no way to relax and now you're going to feel stressed about it and you might feel like it's actually gonna affect your performance and your work in a negative way and it might for a short while but I think the thing that really helps with that is to start to find activities to replace television right it's one thing to just cut out TV and then have no other plan for what you going to do at that time it's another thing to replace it with something else and you have to be smart about what you replace it with this is going to be a personal decision for everybody so for everybody that's watching this it's going to be a different decision depending on what your tastes and hobbies are and I think that one of the dangers here is to to kid yourself and to tell yourself well I'm just going to replace it with doing more work or I'm going to replace it with doing educational type of stuff or doing doing personal development you have to you have to understand why TV is in your life in the first place TV is in your life because it helps you to on widen to recharge your batteries at least that's what it was for me so if you're also in that position then you have to find a suitable activity that's also going to recharge your batteries that help you relax right one of the problems that I made is I was telling myself well I'll just work a little bit more that doesn't tend to work because if all you're doing is working for 12 hours a day then the TV was actually doing you good because too much work just gets you too narrow-minded eventually you do burnout so the activities I'm going to give you here and while I give you a list of activities try to find the ones that you think are actually going to relax you and fill in that that void that's going to be missing once you cut out cable so here's some of stuff and for some of you this will seem like work these activities for others of you it will seem like a joy and also remember that what seems like work today if you do it for a while you do it for a few months you do it for a year it can actually become a joy and become a relaxation activity that used to be a work activity so that's a further wrinkle that gets thrown in here so here's the list one is nonfiction books reading nonfiction books is amazing for you amazing for your performance and it's a lot better than reading fiction books fiction books can also have that kind of effect that TV has so you could do it but be careful don't get too drawn into that next is audio programs I love listening to personal development audio programs I have so many programs that I want to listen to and read listen to again and again and again that really helped me in my life that's a really great way to take up your time and it's also pretty relaxing to do that kind of stuff you can just sit and passively listen it doesn't always take that much effort the next thing is educational videos like they talked about educational YouTube videos you can watch lectures and seminars and Ted videos a lot of stuff that's kind of on the border of education and entertainment something that's a little bit halfway so it's not like very rigorous educational material because that tends to require a lot of brain processing power and that doesn't recharge your batteries that drains your batteries but you can find stuff that's kind of in between and use that to recharge your batteries and also at the same time build up your brain and personal development so you can kind of be killing two birds with one stone there next is meditation meditation is huge I'm going to take now for an hour every day I actually feel like it saves me some time of course it takes an hour out of my schedule every day but I also get some other benefits for example I feel more calm and relaxed and I also feel like I need less sleep when I meditate so don't dismiss that meditation although it might sound boring it also might be stressful at first that actually once you get into the habit of meditating it can be a really pleasurable activity that you can just literally substitute one hour of TV time with one hour meditation time and feel very refreshed and relaxed doing that another really simple activity that you could replace TV with is napping this was actually really practical for me I always felt guilty about napping and my mind was always telling me well if I'm napping then I'm sleeping too much I'm being lazy I'm not working hard enough actually what I've discovered in about the last year or two is that napping is awesome and there's no need to feel guilty about it in fact if you're working really hard then you're probably going to want to take a nap sometime later in the day because you're just exhausting your mental resources so much if you're working a lot so for me I usually do take about a thirty to sixty minute nap in the evening because then it just like recharges me for another run at the work that I'm doing and one big thing with naps that I discovered is that I kind of have this almost like socially conditioned negativity about naps and one of the things I'd always felt my life that I have to be running around in like doing stuff actively right and TV I thought was kind of like also like an active activity I actually put naps under TV kind of on the hierarchy of of like important activities in my life naps would be underneath TV but what I discovered now is that like when you take naps and you just kind of allow yourself to like relax and be a little bit more chill with your schedule not always needing to be filling your schedule to the brim with activity then that's actually a really powerful way to promote your personal development recharge your batteries and just like get that happiness and calmness that you ultimately want right you don't want to be frantic all the time you want to start creating activities in your life that will get you more of that peace and I find that naps are really good for that and the biggest thing in my mind was that I had to kind of condition myself to say oh wait a minute naps are actually like a very healthy form of relaxation right in fact maybe they're one of the most healthiest I would probably put naps and meditation as a top two healthiest ways to just relax yourself and unwind along with that is just simply doing nothing literally like just sitting around and just kind of like enjoying the space that you're sitting in and like doing nothing even if it's only for 10 or 20 minutes that can be a really good way to slow yourself down and also just kind of relax yourself because during your work day you're always like trying to get stuff done everything's very goal oriented and if you just kind of like sit down and have no goals whatsoever that can be a good way to recharge your batteries in and of itself other activities taking walks spending more time with your pet if you have a cat or dog playing with your cat or dog more kids you have if you have kids spending more time with your kids of course is a great thing to do it'll help you it helps them going out a lot of people nowadays are so hooked into media TV internet that they don't leave their houses I know I was like that I'm still kind of like that I took I could force myself to go out go out to bars go out to clubs meet with friends go to the movies that kind of stuff do social events so that can be a really really great way to replace your TV and that's a really good thing because when you're going out with your friends you're going out to a bar or a club your mind just is totally taken totally off of television and so I find that that's a really good substitute because you're never going to be tempted to go back to TV if you're in a in a stimulating environment like a like a nightclub or a bar gym if you don't work out then spending more time at the gym actually what's also cool is that when you reduce your TV intake is that you can also up the amount of time you spend at the gym and I often times find that actually spending more time at the gym that I normally would want to spend can actually be better because you kind of like slow yourself down you give yourself more time to enjoy the actual exercises that you're doing you can do them a little bit slower and you can kind of like relax and know that you have actually a couple of hours to get through your whole routine you don't need to be anywhere so I find that that actually makes a gym more enjoyable if you have a little bit more time you're not always like working towards a clock at the gym because that can be stressful next is a spending more time with your friends just in a coffee shop or wherever you want to meet them on the phone talking chatting you know talking about what kind of life stuff you want to talk about if they're your great friends that you probably enjoy having deep conversations with them and that can be a really great great way to relax unwind from work and also learn stuff in the process because if you have smart friends that are very positive they're doing a lot of stuff in their life they're very ambitious you can learn a lot from them just by sitting and talking with them for an hour - next listening to music there's another great activity that you can replace I think that listening to music is not that damaging to your psyche or doesn't make you that lazy maybe you can overdo it but I find that generally listening to music isn't too bad so that's a good way to relax and it's also kind of similar to TV so that might be a smoother transition for you than doing something like replacing TV with meditation another thing that I like is I've been really getting into it lately is self-hypnosis audios there's a lot of audio programs on self-hypnosis that you can buy and literally what these are they're just like these guided hypnosis sessions it's just like a voice talking it's usually soothe and calming and you can find different hypnosis audios on different stuff like building your confidence or improving your success with the opposite sex or career money really anything or just generally relaxing and stress reducing type of hypnotic audios and just like sit back put your headphones on and listen to it for half an hour or an hour they're going to help you visualize cool stuff and that really promotes your personal growth you get a lot of active personal development that way but it's also like extremely relaxing and it feels extremely good I've really been getting into that lately and that the last one I'm gonna throw out there is cooking cooking is a really great activity I find that you can use it too at the same time build a valuable life skill if you're a guy cooking with girls it's a really hot commodity girls will love you for that if you're a girl learning how to cook guys love that too so really both sexes love for the opposite sex to know how to cook and you can also couple that with the nutrition that you should be improving in your life right eating more nutritiously eating more Whole Foods eating more raw foods or vegetable based foods so cooking is good for you on that level too so you're killing kind of multiple birds with one stone and also I find that it can be relaxing once you learn some of the recipes and stuff then you can just kind of like go do your thing even the process of going to the grocery store and buying groceries that can also just be kind of like a relaxing process and I find that it's very healthy very healthy process so that's a list there's a lot of stuff here and I'm sure you can come up with a much larger list given your specific tastes and hobbies and preferences and where you live and all the options that are or are not available to you so sit down pick one or two or three things that sound like a really good substitute for TV that will help to fulfill that role that TV is playing in your life I think that's the critical piece here make sure that the role that TV plays is also filled by one of these activity that you choose don't choose something that's totally totally out there something that would not be a candidate as to replace TV and really the action item for you from this video is really simple I want you to cancel your cable cancel it right now don't wait till the end of the month because you're going to forget don't wait till the end of the billing cycle call them right now and just cancel it cancel your Netflix cancel your Hulu cancel your Amazon TV cancel any kind of streaming services that you have that give you really easy access to television cancel all that stuff don't throw your television out because you'll be able to use it for other good stuff like educational videos and the occasional DVD so you don't need to get rid of your television just snip that cable and I want you to commit to a 30 day challenge this is how I started to wean myself off television when I got really serious is I committed to a 30 day challenge no TV for 30 days straight and when you do this challenge I would recommend really going cold turkey so I would recommend cutting off cable TV all your Netflix all that stuff obviously but I would even recommend that you don't go to movie theaters you don't do any DVDs or movies of any kind you don't even look at the TV monitors at your gym when you're exercising you just kind of like look away do that for 30 days straight which you're going to finds if you do that for 30 days straight you're going to get through some of those withdrawal symptoms and after 30 days you're not going to be thirsting for TV as much and if you replace TV with some of these other activities like meditation or naps or cooking or listening to music then that substitution is going to take place and you're not going to have that same drive to go back anymore and once you're done with those 30 days see how you feel and if you're feeling good just keep it going keep it going as long as you can cutting that cable is going to help you a lot and what's going to happen is that even after those 30 days you still might feel like you want to go back to TV you might backslide a bit what I found is that really takes about six months to twelve months of no TV to really convince your mind of the fact that you don't need it at all if you told me three years ago or four years ago when I was in the process of breaking this TVs watching cycle and myself if you told me that I would be really happy standing right here right now and not watching any TV in my life for months on end I would be like no way I couldn't do that I couldn't do that and maintain my performance at work that's what I would say but now I found so many other enriching activities in my life that I would rather be doing the television that I don't even think about it it's a pretty amazing shift and just shows you how hooked your brain can get on stuff because you can get so hooked that you don't even realize how hooked you were the whole time and this is going to improve your mood this can improve your negative thinking this is going to remove some of your negative beliefs or at least keep you from being conditioned with even more negative beliefs it's going to take you out of that consumer culture that the TV ads are always trying to feed you and it's going to free up your schedule and it's going to free up your motivation and your your mental resources so that you can be a little bit higher consciousness and then go out there and start creating that amazing life that you want to create if you're watching my videos and you're subscribed to this channel alright so go ahead do that I think this is one of the most important things you can do it in your life it's like a really low hanging fruit if you watch a lot of TV cut that stuff out alrighty I'm signing off this is Leo for actualised org go ahead and post your comments down below let me know what you guys think about this and what your success stories are like also please like this video click the like button for me share with a friend post it on Facebook so that this video can spread we want more people creating extraordinary lives less people watching television and finally come and check out my newsletter at actualized org this is the newsletter it's a free newsletter I release videos on a weekly basis and all my videos are really here to cut through all the all the the media's feeding you stuff that your your parents or your friends are telling you that's keeping you stuck in life I want to cut through all that stuff I want to give you the line that you practically need to really create the feelings that you want in your life the success that you want in your life it's possible for you to have a life that's very passionate in your career and your relationships and where you're thriving on literally every category of your life and you feel like you're a movie star right you feel like you're that amazing like living that amazing dream that you would imagine only somebody in a magazine or on TV living you can have that but you have to work towards it and one of the first things you got to do is cut off that TV but then you know keep building yourself up week after week after week after week and slowly you can get yourself there and I'm really excited about sharing the the best most practical mindsets that I've discovered that are going to help you to do that so sign up and you'll be getting that stuff for free you