Bad news, guys: although mom may not have been right when she said that television would rot your brain out (sometimes it’s tough to distinguish between psychotropic drugs and television ), she may have been right about how you might be better served by not being a couch potato. Does this suck? Yes. But then again, so does Paris Hilton: My New BFF.

The New York Times reports:

Happy people spend a lot of time socializing, going to church and reading newspapers — but they don’t spend a lot of time watching television, a new study finds.

That’s what unhappy people do.

Although people who describe themselves as happy enjoy watching television, it turns out to be the single activity they engage in less often than unhappy people, said John Robinson, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland and the author of the study, which appeared in the journal Social Indicators Research.

While most large studies on happiness have focused on the demographic characteristics of happy people — factors like age and marital status — Dr. Robinson and his colleagues tried to identify what activities happy people engage in. The study relied primarily on the responses of 45,000 Americans collected over 35 years by the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey, and on published “time diary” studies recording the daily activities of participants.

If you're really attached to the tube, you don’t need to totally stop this television business, but perhaps trim away the fat, and by “fat” I mean disgustingly awful television. Bye-bye Desperate Housewives! Bye-bye Grey’s Anatomy! Bye-bye Real World! And if you can't make the decision yourself about what not to watch, Dirty Sexy Money was cancelled just in time for your newfound non-voyeur, happy person ways!