Harder than I Thought

Change is never easy, no matter what aspect of your life you are talking about.  Change is especially difficult when you’re talking about a habit that you are making a conscious effort to change.  In my case, turning the television off before I fall asleep, it sounds like a relatively easy task.  When I feel my eyes starting to shut, as I feel myself drifting off to sleep, just grab the remote and press the power button.  But I have found this habit much harder to break than I had previously imagined.

The sound of the television and the subtle light is something that has helped me fall asleep in the past.  Trying to change this behavior, when I am trying to fall asleep without this, I find myself craving those missing elements of my nightly routine.  It is difficult for me to actually not grab the remote again and turn the television back on.  I’ve started to realize that this is definitely a mental thing; obviously I do not need a television running to fall asleep.  But because I’ve become so used to it, it is difficult for me to drift off to sleep without it.  I still have been tracking how many nights a week I have been able to turn off the TV.  The last time I posted, I had left it on 5 out of the 7 nights of the week, and I have been able to get it down to 4.

I do think about the environmental implications that my behavior change would have if I was able to fully follow through with it.  A full nights sleep is anywhere from 6 to 10 hours for me, depending on the day.  That is a ton of hours of unnecessary, unused electricity that I am wasting.  If I were able to fully follow through with this behavior change, I calculated that I would average about 308 hours of saved electricity.  308 hours!  That is almost 13 full days.  I used this energy calculator and found that I could be saving approximately 60 watts of energy per night. http://www.paystolivegreen.com/energy-savings-calculator/  I am hoping that as the weeks go on, and I begin to become more used to a silent, dark room, it will become easier for me to change my behavior.