I am a person who can easily be addicted to something in a very unhealthy way. Like watching Youtube for 12 hours per day is really easy thing for me. However, to break down this habit I changed several things and luckily — successfully. Here are my 5 advices how to break it.
1. 5 minute rule
When you have urge to watch something in YouTube, just wait for 5 minutes. Think about. Do you need to watch it now? If it is just an urge to fill your time or run away from problems in real life, don’t do it. In the book “Willpower Instinct”, author gives advice to wait 5–15 minutes to urge go away. Usually, if you developed unhealthy habit of watching YouTube daily, your brain starts acting automatically on biological level. Therefore, you need time to realise whether it is your unhealthy habit and unconscious urge or you really want to watch it. This tactic really helped me a lot! Recommend.
2. Have a hobby in real life
What do I mean by “real life”? I mean hobby that does not include Internet. The author of book “Digital Minimalism” states that people needs to fill the time spent on social media with the hobby that excludes everything digital. In my case, I started cooking instead of watching YouTube. After 6 months, I can assure that cooking changed my life a lot. I started spending more time with my family and my friends as I share my meals with them. I gained the weight I wanted to. And lastly saved a lot of money.
3. Create YouTube channel
This is my personal advice. I do not know whether it will help you or not, but it definitely helped me to break my YouTube addiction. When I created my YouTube channel and started making some content, I realized how much hard it is. Every time I watch new YouTube video instead of just enjoying the content I start to ask myself how they filmed, how they edited it. Because of it, watching YouTube become more like a job instead of enjoyment.
4. Change your recommended videos
Instead of just watching some random videos on YouTube, I started watching only Software Engineering related videos. After one month or two YouTube started recommending me only a boring (I am joking) videos such as new “MERN e-commerce website” or something like that.
5. Do not listen music on YouTube
The biggest mistake of mine was to listen music on YouTube because my recommended videos were messed up with celebrity staff like gossips, celebrity news and etc. Which is somehow addictive, like who does not want to know which size Scarlet Johansen wears? I am joking of course, but really just buy apple music subscription or something else. It really will clean your recommender system.
I hope these advices will help you to break your addiction watching YouTube.
