If you are reading this you likely want to be successful and improve your life in many ways but you may also have some negative habits that waste valuable time.
I’ve recently been reading through the book Atomic Habits (highly recommend) and what I noticed was one trick that I accidentally used to destroy my YouTube addiction was explained heavily in the book – everything clicked for me.
This post will explain how I finally beat my YouTube addiction after years of trying (and failing). While I recommend a tool specifically for YouTube on desktop devices the logic itself can be applied to any bad habit – barring extreme physical dependence.
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Introduction
I used to probably spend hours on YouTube daily even during periods where I had a job and went to school – it was bad. If I can beat this habit you can as well.
While some of it shaped me into who I am today in a positive way (education, health, science, entrepreneurship, finance, etc) a lot of it was also a huge time waster (anime, gaming, entertainment, etc).
Entertainment is not necessarily bad – but what I was doing wasn’t entertaining me. It was mindless scrolling to receive small amounts of pleasure, numb myself, whatever.
You could even argue that the educational content itself was an (albeit lesser) waste of time because I was just wasting away not taking any action towards any of my goals. Taking action is where you actually can start to receive feedback, make yourself known to others who may want to work with you, and many other great opportunities.
Either way, the mindless consumption was something that needed to be stopped.
Logic
I highly suggest reading the book “Atomic Habits” by James Clear. Every other book I’ve read on addiction/habits was irrelevant when compared to this book. I’ll be writing a full review on it soon – it’s useful for breaking the bad and forming good habits.
The logic for small addictions or bad habits goes like this: makes it harder to perform the habit itself. That’s right – imagine you need to plug in your Xbox every time you want to play a game, it’ll be on some level more annoying to play games compared to before.
This happened to me with gaming as well – my PC became outdated and to play games I would have to invest a fair amount of time into buying a new PC. If this addiction was stronger I might just have bought a new PC anyway, but my point is that the bad habit became harder on some level so I just stopped doing it without much thought.
It’s scary to think about how much of your life is lived automatically – I used to wake up in the morning and subconsciously start typing Youtube.com in a daze just to get straight to consuming content – not entirely conducive to success.
Beating Youtube Addiction
So how did I go from hours of mindless consuming daily to only watching content that entertains or educates me? Simple – I accidentally made the mindless portion of the habit way harder to access.
In my case I would often just go on to listen in the background to make noise while I was doing other things – it was an automatic response.
One day (on YouTube) I heard about an extension that blocks the YouTube recommended page, and recommended content list, and only shows videos from people you subscribe to. I decided to give it an attempt thinking I would just circumvent the program either way.
It turns out that when that automatic mindless access to content stopped I also stopped watching the content mindlessly.
When I automatically went to Youtube.com and saw some Lofi hip hop channels instead of whatever exciting new videos the algorithm wanted to feed me I usually started wondering why I came to Youtube and just went to do other more productive things.
The small barrier I put up started making me think about what I was going to watch.
My use of the platform is more intentional and focused now, when I watch entertaining things I’m more entertained because it wasn’t the 50th video I saw that day.
When I want to learn things that specific content has my full focus rather than just being something I listened to in the background to feel productive while still being lazy.
Tool I Used
Extension: Unhook – Remove YouTube Recommended Videos
This is a Chrome extension that doesn’t entirely disable YouTube but instead only allows you to watch content from channels you specifically subscribe to.
It limits every other aspect of junk YouTube offers.
Like I said, for whatever digital platform or habit you may use or bad habit in general the logic remains the same: make the process slightly harder.
My YouTube addiction wasn’t on a level where I needed to completely toss my device but if it was maybe I could’ve increased the annoyance of visiting the platform by blocking it from my device completely, etc.
The more ingrained a habit is the harder you will likely have to work to stop that automatic process.
Final Thoughts
In the end, I’m not one of those people who think you need to live like a monk to become successful, but if you have something (you know what it is) that is sapping a lot of time, money, energy, etc at least try the concept of making that habit or addiction slightly harder to perform or get access to.
Even this slight change in my routine destroyed an addiction I’ve tried so many times to manage.
I’m not even anti-YouTube either – if I want to watch stuff my subscriptions are either highly entertaining things that I enjoy or highly educational pieces of content that specifically motivate or help me in my goals such as business, health, etc.
I just don’t fall into watching something recommended to me and wasting 3 hours and not knowing what I got from the experience. I don’t seek out irrelevant video after video watching them and still being unhappy after.
Getting recommended for this extension probably altered the course of my life to some extent so maybe I can do the same for you. Either way, thanks for reading!