Name: quitting your youtube addiction is easy, actually
Uploaded: 2024-11-28T21:01:10.000Z
Duration: 5 min 10 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

So if you've ever tried to quit social media, you've probably told yourself that YouTube doesn't count, you know, because it's educational.

Future simple

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 not productive.

To-infinitive

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 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.

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, huh, couldn't ever be me.

So while you shouldn't quit watching YouTube entirely, here's an easy method I found to at least stop being addicted to it.

Step one 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.

Then, step two is the second line of defense.

I don't find it that useful to download an app blocker, or a website blocker extension, because 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.

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 in the comments too, and you can also turn on grayscale, so that every video you watch isn't 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 video's 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 recommend 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 at 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 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.

Now that you have a bunch of extra free time, you want to 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.

 By the way, I'm collecting donations in the form of subscribes to fund the next video.

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