Books are to film what a whole food plant based diet is to junk food.   Films are nothing but highly processed stories, they give the general outline of the story and characters without any of the depth, thoughts, nuance, insight, etc., that the book contains.   Essentially, films, like junk food, have all the fibre and nutrients removed from the original product to leave you wanting, desiring, and needing to consume more; purely for corporations to make more and more profit at the expense of the consumer’s health and wellbeing.   And, lo and behold, this ultimately means more and more profits for pharmaceutical corporations: the corporations win every time while you the consumer become more addicted to their crap.   Consuming hours of video each and every night, flooding our brains with thousands and thousands of shallow story lines each week, is not healthy for our minds, and sitting there staring at a screen for hours on end shoving crap into your mouth is not healthy for your body.

The worse of it isn’t that people are simply replacing one book with one film, but that they watch film and tv for several hours in the evening before going to bed.   It that time they consume dozens of books worth of stripped down highly processed content, and this happens night after night after night.   And with tv series you also have thousands of characters’ story lines that have to be held in our minds for weeks and months on end.   We simply did not evolve to have so many story lines going around in our minds at one time, we did not evolve to have so many people in our minds at one time; yet here we are force feeding countless people’s story lines, one on top of the other, into a space that was never designed to deal with it.   Think about it, we evolved in small hunter gatherer groups with occasional meetings with other small local groups.   We had so few story lines in our minds, and those story lines were always relevant to our lives.

And as though that is not enough abuse, we then add to that the never ending force feeding of adverts that come with the tv shows and the product placements put in them, all telling you how crap your life is without the latest thing: wouldn’t your life be so much better if only you bought this thing you don’t really need and had never even heard of until the advert showed you it?   Yes, you could also have the exciting, young and beautiful man or woman on your arm if you only owned this car, drank this drink, ate this food, wore these clothes, etc..

This is not good, and we wonder why depression and anxiety are at such epidemic proportions in societies that watch the most film and tv and have the most adverts: the continuous dissatisfaction of ones life being drummed into ones head night after night after night.

And then to add the ultimate insult to this injury this all comes courtesy of a high powered, high blue, back lit screen pushing it all into your eyes.   This completely disrupts our brain’s melatonin cycle, which in turn completely disrupts our sleep and dream cycles.   This again leaves us anxious and depressed, and also tired, paranoid and ageing far quicker than we should be.   Essentially, any back lit screen before bed is unhealthy on every level.

So take a break from film and tv and read some books instead.   Ditch the TV licence and buy some books, or a Kindle, instead — far cheaper, especially if you get books from your local library or charity shops.   Slow down your brain’s consumption of new characters, story lines, adverts, etc., and allow yourself to sleep, dream, rest and recover as you need to do for good health, fitness and well being.

I’ve had a tv watcher tell me that they’d like to read in the evening but they just fall asleep.   That’s great!   If you find yourself falling asleep while reading it’s because you’re tired and need to sleep.   So instead of fighting it and flooding your brain with the blue light of a television screen to prevent you sleeping, just go to sleep — even if it is 6pm.   You’ll feel so much better in the morning.

So, with all that in mind, if you are reading in the evening before bed, then consider a few things… High blue light is not good.   Use a low kelvin (under 2000K), low watt (under 40w) light bulb to minimise the light as much as can be done while still being able to see what you’re reading.   This is why the Kindle Paperwhite is so good for bedtime reading: you can use a small, low watt, low kelvin, light bulb for your non-reading needs and then use the light on the Kindle for reading it and you can dim that down incredibly low while having it still perfectly readable.   The Paperwhite is not back lit, it’s side lit, and you can dim it so low it doesn’t mess up your melatonin.   Yes, you’ll find yourself feeling tired and sleepy doing this at first, that’s because you’re sleep deprived from all that tv.   So take all that extra sleep, enjoy it, and you’ll soon find that you don’t fall asleep so quickly and you can read much longer.

There’s some really wonderful books out there, and a wonderful world awaits away from the tv screen.   Try it for a year, go on, i dare you!