Eight years ago our household got rid of television. It was easy. The cable guy came out, flipped a switch, and the screen went fuzzy.

We’ve never been happier.

Instead of staring at Friends and Seinfeld episodes we’d seen a dozen times, we got into making dinner, trying out new recipes. We read aloud. Instead of channel surfing, we started going out for walks through the neighborhood. We took up old hobbies.

It’s hard to mention that you don’t have television without seeming a little self-righteous. People immediately get defensive. Oh, we have television, but we hardly ever watch it, they say. Or: We only watch PBS.

We mention it simply because a study has just been published looking at television and personal happiness. Or unhappiness, to be more accurate.

In an analysis of data gathered from nearly 30,000 adults, researchers at the University of Maryland found that people who describe themselves as unhappy watch 20 percent more television than those who say they’re happy.

The survey found that self-described happy people, in addition to watching less TV, were more socially active, read more newspapers, and attended more religious services. They also voted more often.

Wierdly enough, TV junkies reported being happy with television. As John P. Robinson, one of the authors of the study, explained, “What viewers seem to be saying is that, ‘While TV in general is a waste of time and not particularly enjoyable, the shows I saw tonight were pretty good.’”

As the researchers point out, it’s easy to watch TV. You don’t have to get dressed up and drive anywhere. Hell, you don’t even have to get up off the sofa. It’s a great way to kill time, and unhappy people, the survey showed, have time to kill. More than half said they had unwanted extra time on their hands, compared to fewer than one in five happy people.

Something else about heavy television watchers has emerged from other studies: they tend to weigh more than infrequent viewers. In a 2008 Canadian study, one quarter of people who watched 21 hours of TV or more a week were obese, compared to only about 12 percent of those who watched five hours or less.

It’s impossible to say, from the latest study, whether watching television makes people unhappy or whether unhappy people tend to watch TV. It is clear, though, that watching a lot of television tends to make people fat. And that probably doesn’t make anyone happy.

The solution, of course, is simple. Turn it off.

Get rid of it if you have to.

You could find yourself feeling a lot happier.

And maybe a few pounds lighter.

Tags: happiness, obesity, television, weight