I have been struggling with my youtube addiction ever since I was a very young child. I’ve always struggled with procrastinating for hours on end watching an endless feed of videos instead of being productive. I would tell myself that I would watch just a little bit of youtube, just ‘one more video’, and then I would waste so many hours of my day. And it would sap all of my energy, so I couldn’t be productive even if I wanted to. so I would watch more while feeling additional guilt and hopelessness. I love youtube, but it also takes away all of my time. And that was the cycle I’ve been living in for a long time.
So that was the problem I had to solve: I want to watch youtube, but I don’t want to watch too much of it that it interferes with the things I actually want to do. Was there a way I could have my cake and eat it too? Potentially. Since implementing a few simple changes, I’ve felt a lot more productive. There are still days where I rot in bed, but these changes have made me feel much more in control of my addiction. I don’t feel like the platform is controlling me as much. In this post, I’ll tell you what I did to fix it. And the answer didn’t lie in deleting youtube, but changing how I interact with it. Sites like instagram, twitter, and of course, youtube, are part of a giant industry made to capture and monetize your attention. And they’ve gotten really, really good at it. In fact, they have teams of people called “attention engineers” for this purpose. They are the reason we are addicted to their platforms. In order to break my addiction, I will change my own behaviors and I will change key features of the platform that cause me to engage in the ‘bad’ habit of watching too many videos.If you want to learn more about the science behind habits, I recommend the book, ‘atomic habits’ by James Clear. It has legitimately been really helpful and is something I will reference a lot, although I will paraphrase most of it. There are four aspects to a habit: cue, craving, response, reward.
To understand these, let’s use an example.
The cue: your phone buzzes with a new text notification.
Craving: you want to know what they said.
Response: you unlock your phone.
Reward: you get to know what they said and maybe get a hit of dopamine.
So there are four things you can do to build a good habit: make your habit obvious (cue), make it attractive (craving), make it easy (response), and make it satisfying (reward). And if you want to break a bad habit? Just do the opposite. Make your habit invisible (cue), make it unattractive (craving), make it difficult (response), make it unsatisfying (reward). So let’s put this to the test. First is the cue. If I see cookies on the counter, that is a ‘cue’ for my brain to start craving it even if I didn’t intend to eat them. If I see my phone first thing in the morning, that is the ‘cue’ whereby I start craving watching videos before eating breakfast. First, I charge my phone in another room. And to replace that habit, I do scripture study first thing in the morning. I place my scriptures in a spot where I will see them and before I go to that room to get my phone, I read.
But we need to go deeper. I didn’t have the youtube app (I downloaded it again for reasons you will learn later, but that’s not relevant right now), and I watched it only on chrome. I also have a laptop where I can watch it on the site. First, I made youtube completely invisible on my laptop. I used a chrome extension called “stay focused’. Basically, I am only allowed 5 minutes on youtube per day. If I have to get a clip to make a video, for example, this allows me to quickly go in and grab the url before it’s blocked. 5 minutes is not enough time for me to watch anything, but just enough for what I need. And I can add certain youtube videos to the “unblocked” list in case I need to watch a tutorial or listen to music or something. I thought I would need lots of videos unblocked for these types of things, but honestly I haven’t looked at them much. There is also a handy feature that can block all of your blocked sites for a set amount of time. This tool makes it so my laptop is virtually youtube distraction free. If I need to work on, say, a blog post for example—I simply put my phone in another room and just like that—I can’t watch youtube while I’m working!
As for my phone, google chrome is no longer on my homepage. It is behind two button presses, making it a little more difficult to get to and less obvious. And on my homepage, I put my to-do list and productive apps like google drive as the first thing I see. Also, I have moved from google chrome to firefox. Sue me, but I like firefox on my phone way more than google. The key thing is that firefox 1. Lets you customize your homepage so you don’t immediately see the news or your most recently opened apps (like youtube), and 2. Gives you an option to immediately make a new tab whenever you open it up rather than put you on the last tab you were on. This eliminates all immediate cues to watch videos instead of looking things up on the search engine. And it is also a lot easier to add extensions, which we will get to later.
You know what else has cues? The freaking youtube algorithm. This is perhaps the biggest threat youtube poses to our attention. The algorithm touches on literally 80 billion data points in order to personalize our recommendations and get our attention hooked. And, as we know, they are really, really good at it. I challenge you to set a timer for five minutes, and scroll through your youtube recommendations without clicking on a single video. It is an infinite pool of videos personalized to your tastes and curated to capture your attention. It is also infinite, which means that you continue to fall deeper and deeper… But did you know that there are chrome extensions that can get rid of the algorithm and every other feature of the app? The one that I use on my laptop is RYS (remove youtube suggestions). I no longer have a giant gallery of video and shorts suggestions. It is now just a beautiful white screen with a searchbar. I no longer have youtube shorts. I no longer have a comment suggestion to read while I watch the video. I just look it up and watch. It is incredible. For my phone, I have the unhook youtube extension. I can’t really tell you why they're different, but they both work and that’s what matters. I have applied a lot of the same great features.
To be honest, the algorithm hasn’t been completely erased: just greatly reduced in prevalence. Obviously it still works when I search things up, and when I watch a video I can pull up the side suggestions and keep watching new videos. Honestly, I don’t mind finding new videos and new content creators that I could like, but a further step makes this binging more of a non-issue anyway.
So while removing the biggest tool youtube has to hold our attention has been very useful, we still have work to do. To recap: I can no longer watch youtube on my laptop, and it’s only available on my phone. I no longer see youtube suggestions. At this point, I have also made a youtube account (in all of my years of this addiction, I have actually never had one before) and subscribed to my favorite channels so I can continue to keep tabs on them. Things have gotten better, and yet I still keep coming back to youtube all the time to see if they’ve uploaded and I end up staying.
This is another key aspect of social media: Variable Reward Systems. It’s a constant loop built on uncertainty and built to keep you coming back. It’s your craving to know if you’ve been given likes, shares, or if no one has seen your post at all. Every time you get a like, you get a little dopamine hit. But, importantly, these hits are random. It’s a variable reward. It’s kind of like a slot machine. You go to the app, uncertain of if you will get that dopamine hit or not. For me? I had to keep checking back to see when my favorite youtubers upload a new video. Most of them don’t have a consistent upload schedule, making it random. But when they do upload, that’s a dopamine hit.
Which is why I downloaded the youtube app. Sounds counterintuitive, but with notifications turned on for all of them I no longer have to check back. I simply get notified on my phone which videos are uploaded without needing to go into the app and wanting to stay. Luckily, my extensions have also applied to the app which makes it virtually the same as accessing it from firefox as I have been doing previously. So still no algorithm. And, of course, the app is hidden from my homescreen. And now, for my most recent and perhaps best addition. It is an app that makes youtube unattractive, difficult, and unsatisfying. As a bit of background, on my laptop I use a chrome extension called “tab for a cause”. Every time you open a new tab, there are small ads that play at the bottom of the window. And the ad money goes to one of their added charities. So you are raising money just by using the internet every day. Very cool, but they also recently launched an app called “pause for a cause”.Here’s how it works: Using the app, I select youtube and firefox. In the settings, I’ve turned on the option to pause for 45 seconds (you can change the amount, but I think 45 second is long enough to be painful without being too long). When I go to open either of those apps, it is completely blocked unless I wait for those 45 seconds, or I watch an ad that typically goes faster. The ad money is then donated to charity. Small tangent, but I HATE those ads so much. It’s mostly ai slop! I feel conflicted watching them because I detest them so, but at the same time they are for charity. Anyway, after this youtube is unlocked for me for 10 minutes which counts down from a small timer on the screen. After these 10 minutes, the process repeats.
This is great for many reasons: 1. I have to consciously choose to continue watching. 2. It unhooks me from watching and gives me a natural break time to pause and consider if I want to continue. I can simply tell myself that I will continue watching until the timer is up, and then I will stop. 3. In those 45 seconds, I can motivate myself to get up and do what I was meaning to do in the first place. If I decided to start watching videos on the couch while I was going to my room, then in those 45 seconds I can go to my room and start doing laundry while the video starts back up. 4. I can still watch youtube and keep up with youtubers without deleting the app. 5. It’s kept me from wasting as much time. Actually, the week after I downloaded it, the time spent watching youtube dropped 45 minutes! And 6., waiting and watching ads are deeply unsatisfying and make the action more difficult. It discourages me from watching youtube.
And, in case you’re wondering, having to wait to access a search engine because of youtube isn’t actually that bad. It’s annoying when I need to grab an art reference or look something up in a public setting, but 45 seconds isn’t actually too long and 10 minutes is enough time to grab a screenshot. Also, I can just look things up on my computer. If I ever feel like youtube is taking too much of my life, I do a mini youtube fast. I don’t let myself watch youtube for a week, and instead replace it with watching movies or streaming or something. When I come back, I typically feel more in control for a little bit.
As important it is to break a bad habit, it’s also important to replace it with something else. One crazy fact really puts things into perspective: the average american spends around 2 hours and 30 minutes per day on social media. So 2.5 x 365 means that a full year equals 912 hours spent! That is 38 days! More than an entire month! And according to the university of maine, the world collectively spends 11.5 BILLION hours on social media platforms daily. Think of all you can do if you had 912 extra hours in your year! You could finally do that big project you’ve been putting off. You could learn a new language. You could get really good at a sport. You could serve in your community. You could spend more time with loved ones. For me, writing a story I really care about has been how I’ve been replacing my time. I’ve even recently started drawing a webcomic.
I’m not saying that social media is an inherently bad thing or even a bad way to spend your time. Youtube has brought me and my loved ones together. It has given me new interests, it’s been how I’ve learned a lot of things. And I think it’s important to have time to relax and not use your brain for a while. But I refuse to let it take over my life. I don’t want big corporations controlling how I spend my time. I am terrified of getting to the end of my life and regretting that I spent too much time on things that don’t matter. We live in a loneliness epidemic. It’s a time when social media simultaneously makes us more connected than ever and drives us apart. What would change if we spent less time looking at screens alone and more time with each other? What would change if we spent less time watching videos and more time doing things that we can be proud of? Things that could make the world better? We have 11.5 billion hours we could use to make that happen. I think we should use them.
I’m certainly not perfect at this. I still rot in bed from time to time. I still struggle to stay away and use my time effectively. But I’m determined to keep updating my system. If any of this resonates with you, then know you aren’t alone. I hope you don’t let social media control your life. And I hope you don’t let the fear of failure keep you from doing the things you want. Our lives are short, and there is no better time than now to start living it the way you want to. But it should always be your choice to spend time on social media. Not theirs.