from Journal of Communication
So you come home from a long, hard day at work and you just want to put your feet up, turn on TV or play a video game to relax and decompress. Who doesn’t just need some simple down time after the stress of a hard day on the job? A study by German researchers offers a much more complex chain of emotions. They found people with high stress levels after work and who sat down to relax in front of the tube did not feel relaxed or recovered, but rather had high levels of guilt and feelings of failure. The study in the Journal of Communication found that people who were most fatigued after work also showed a higher tendency to feel their television or video viewing was a form of procrastination and thus felt guilty about it or felt it was a sign of their own self-control failure.