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. By the way, I'm collecting donations in the 

form of subscribes to fund the next video.