Sitting down and watching the old boob tube while flipping through channels may be a relaxing way to wind down after a hard day of work, but it’s also a great way to channel unhappiness.

A large, long term study that included 45,000 participants and 34 years worth of data from those participants found that unhappiness was significantly correlated with television watching.

The study’s participants kept track of their daily activities and how they were feeling in a daily diary. Based on these journal entries and information gathered by the General Social Survey, the researchers, hailing from the University of Maryland (Go Terrapins!), found several correlative factors when it came to what activities the participants involved themselves in and how happy they considered themselves to be.

The happiest participants were those who socialized, engaged in regular sex with their husband or wife, read newspapers and attended religious services. Overall, these were the activities the happiest of participants did the most.

As for the unhappiest, the one thing that was directly correlated with their sorry state was television watching. The unhappiest participants watched 30 percent more television (in terms of hours spent watching television) and had sex far less frequently as well. Further, those participants who believed they were in an unhappy marriage tended to watch television more frequently than those in happy marriages.

The study’s researchers say that while this study may suggest television causes unhappiness, it’s actually just the reverse. Chronically unhappy people can go to television and be at least mildly entertained, whereas unhappy people often have a hard time with being entertained in public because it requires the kind of social interaction that usually suffers when one is unhappy. In short, unhappy people tend to gravitate toward television.

So…how does one become happy?

To me, happiness is something that needs to be worked on like a muscle; the more often you work on it, the stronger and easier it is to get through life’s difficulties (a very wise man I know says that in his experience, the difficulty of one’s life is seldom an indication of how happy a person is).

One way of trying to become happier is by simply doing the things that one may not feel like doing at the moment, such as going to a social event or religious service. More often than not, I’ve been glad I’ve done something when I initially did not want to do that something.

Another way of remaining happy is by keeping one’s self busy. Based on the researchers’ survey, 51 percent of “not happy” people said they had too much time on their hands, while only 19 percent of “very happy” people had a slow pace of life.

The researchers conclude that television watching is very much like an addiction to a drug – the short-term make the activity seem pleasurable, but the effects aren’t long lasting. What’s more, the addiction prevents one from engaging in other more worthwhile experiences that have long lasting benefits.

A few months ago I wrote about television viewing being linked to weight gain. Now comes television viewing being linked to unhappiness. Television ownership and the obesity rate have never been at higher rates than they are today (99 percent of homes in America have at least one television; 50 percent of the residents in Huntington, West Virginia are considered obese). Similarly, antidepressants are the most prescribed drug on the market today.

Are these rising rates all coincidences, one having nothing to do with the other? I think not.