 REASONS WHY YOUNG PEOPLE ARE BECOMING COUCH POTATOES

 HOW CAN WE SOLVE THE PROBLEM

(TITLE)

If you’re a teenager like me, maybe you know what most adults say about us. ‘Go outside, take
some air, you can’t be like this the whole day!’. We hear it all the time when our parents beg
us to get out of our comfortable bed, to feel the breeze caressing our skin and to exercise to
keep our body active. Instead, we prefer to stay inside, to watch our favourite TV shows and to
stay as still as slugs. I’ve always thought parents are overreacting, but mum and dad might not
be wrong after all.

In our current society, the time devoted to playing sports and doing exercise has now been
occupied by watching videos on TikTok or enjoying Netflix series. Most young people who own
a phone don’t realise the amount of time they spend in front of their screens, which is the
main reason why they don’t exercise as much as they did in previous years. It seems that our
most beloved friend, technology, is our worst enemy. Technology not only entertain us, but
also makes us lose the track of time and develop unhealthy habits such as lying in bed with our
phones.

Young people are also becoming ‘couch potatoes’ since they spend most of their school time
sitting. Young people’s daily routines mainly consist of going to school, where they don’t get
the freedom to run or jump — except in P.E. classes— and studying or doing homework, which
don’t provide much opportunity to move around. If we do the math, we might be talking about
six or seven hours of sedentary habits, and we’re not even considering the hours for leisure
time with our computers or game consoles.

Is there a solution to this problem of sedentarism? Well, if we decide to cut off our screen time
and spend that time more efficiently at the gym or the sports centre; to suggest our teachers a
more dynamic learning that involves body movement, there is. It may not be easy, but
definitely, not impossible.