quitting your YouTube addiction is easy, actually

If you’ve ever tried to “quit” social media, you’ve probably told yourself  that YouTube doesn’t count. You know, cause it’s — educational. But if you take a second to  think about what you watch, you’ll realize that about half the time you spend  on YouTube is unproductive, and the other half is just There’s really no way to sugarcoat it,  it’s pretty much entirely just wasted time.

So one day I finally decided to quit watching YouTube. But what I quickly found is that most of the  advice out there isn’t really that helpful. It’s almost always a bit too extreme and it’s a bit  too restrictive, and it’s hard to actually follow.

And that eventually led to me to figure out that  it doesn’t work to just cut out YouTube entirely. And honestly, you shouldn’t. Because, entertainment is fine  to consume once in a while.

And besides, some things you can’t easily  learn from a book. Like how to tie a tie or how to pressure wash a driveway. Sometimes  you need to look up a video on YouTube.

But besides that, most videos, like the  ones you get recommended on the homepage, or in the suggestions, most of  those videos are just filler. They’re not that fun to watch. They’re not that  relaxing to watch.

And if we’re being honest, they’re usually not productive either.  They basically just fill up time. I remember seeing this TED Talk one time, and  the guy pulled up a graphic, and it said that for young people, out of all the time you have left in  your life, that’s not spent on sleeping, eating, driving, working, hygiene, or doing chores,  93% of it will be spent looking at a screen.

And I looked at that and I thought, Could never be me. So while you shouldn’t quit YouTube entirely, here’s an easy method I found  to at least cure your addiction. Step 1 is the strongest and most  effective step.

And it’s to start consciously recognizing that your YouTube  suggested feed is pretty much 99% useless. I always knew that certain videos like  stream clips and commentary videos, and funny videos, were a waste of time.  But I didn’t realize that podcast clips, educational videos, self-development  videos, were also a waste of time.

I was convincing myself it was productive to  watch them. But if you open up the homepage for 10 seconds, and you just don’t click on anything,  and you really look at what it’s serving you, you realize, none of these videos have  changed anything for you in the past, and they probably won’t change anything now. You click it, you watch it, you think  you’re getting something out of it, but 99% of the time, you come out of it the  exact same person, doing the exact same actions.

Realize that every time you get a suggested video, that specific video realistically  won’t change anything. And that is the trick to  stop binge-watching YouTube. Blocking the website, turning on restrictions, downloading extensions, that all  works.

But it’s way more effective to just look at a video straight in its  eyes and just have no desire to watch it. Step 2 is the second line of defense. I don’t find it that useful to download an  app blocker or a website blocker extension, cause it’s so restrictive, you just  want to immediately turn it off.

So instead, the best thing  I found, for your computer, is an extension called UnTrap for  YouTube. Just search it up, It’s free. What it does is it allows you to  customize pretty much everything you see on YouTube.

You can turn  off Shorts so they’re just gone. You can even completely hide  the suggestions if you want. But for the homepage, I like to  keep the suggestions and just turn off infinite scrolling.

That way you  have about 20 videos to choose from, and then that’s it, you can’t just keep  scrolling down until you find a good one. Eventually, when you actually go into a video, You  can disable the title, the views, the description, the buttons, so you can’t click on the channel,  you can turn off suggestions, and the comments too, and you can turn on grayscale, so that  every video you watch is in black and white. So you get the video, but it’s just  less stimulating, less distracting, and you have no option to go down  the suggested videos rabbit hole.

And for your phone, you can  get this app called ScreenZen. It won’t block YouTube, but every time you  open the YouTube app, it’ll pause for 5, 10, 30, 100 seconds, you get to choose how  long, and it’ll show you an unskippable message that you can also customize. I  reccomend you make it something insulting.

After the 5 seconds are up, you can choose to  unlock the app for a few minutes at a time or to just not open it all. And if your insult  is good enough, you probably won't want to. But the best feature, at least for me, is that  you could separately block YouTube shorts.

I don’t know how they made this a feature,  but you can make it so that even if you unlock the YouTube app, you’ll get a separate  warning if you try to watch a YouTube short. And I hate to admit this, but lately,  YouTube Shorts has been unironically getting pretty good. So if you also  find yourself shamefully watching them and enjoying them, this app  will catch you in 4k every time.

Step 3, is now replace the habit. Now that you have a bunch of extra free time, you wanna fill that free time with something  that’s not just other social media. You can use this time to read, study,  exercise, go outside, go to events, or even record your own videos and  upload them once every 3 months.

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