Procrastination is not a time management problem; it's an emotional management problem.

What it comes down to is not having belief in what you do, so you do other things. You might feel trapped, so you pass the time with stuff like YouTube because that is the most compelling thing available to you. A man will walk on broken glass with a smile if he truly believes in what it will accomplish.

When I was younger, I was into video games because they gave me a sense of accomplishment and progress compared to high school, which I found relatively meaningless. I called it progress quest.

When there is a rare game or youtube topic that really obsessively catches your attention, like Factorio, pay attention to it! It helps show you what drives you, and you can try to leverage that into things you find healthier.

Also, it might be worth it to look into ADHD testing if this has been a persistent pattern your entire life.

The problem is, in real life you're unlikely to find yourself in a situation where your needs are met, or at least have an action plan how to get there. There are tons of things that go wrong and you can't do anything about that. Stuck in a shitty job? Sucks to be you. Marriage drains you emotionally? Sucks to be you. Mother is sick and you need to take care of her? Again, sucks to be you. "Find a passion" is actually a ridiculously unrealistic standard - most people really do spend their free time just scrolling TikTok.

I'm really really tired of people throwing solutions at my problems while one of the problems is that I'm fundamentally profoundly tired of trying and failing.

Yeah, burnout is hard, and real. Everything you've described, I've literally been in an equivalent. To get out of these ruts requires a sober assessment of where you are and some hard decisions, and maybe the end result is acceptance for someone in your case. As I said, it's belief that drives this, and you do have ultimate control & choice over your beliefs.

For many tho, what I said is a revelation and it can save them from yet another ineffective pomodoro exercise. Many are not middle aged people stuck in a hard place and this advice helps them.

> When I was younger, I was into video games because they gave me a sense of accomplishment and progress compared to high school, which I found relatively meaningless. I called it progress quest.

Well do I have a game for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_Quest

Heh, yes it was inspired by that game once I saw it.

It's just difficult to tease out at what scale you should address the problem. It requires reflection, ideally together with someone, on where you are headed. Maybe the answer doesn't lie on the level of setting up firewall rules or setting timers but on the level of having to change jobs or even careers, cities, or finding new social connections, or resolving some conflicts with family or whoever. There can be many reasons for escapism like that.

I'm a programmer, a creative person, working on my projects, and regularly I need a short break, so on every break I usually lay in bed and checked the news and I often ended on YouTube watching more videos, wasting hours every day. What eventually helped me was use css to replace entire YouTube (and other doom scrolling websites) with a motivational picture that says:

"One day, you'll realize that your dream died because you chose comfort over effort. Don't let that regret haunt you forever."

And it worked.

The css for yt looks like this:

    body {
     min-height: 100vh;
     background-image:url(https://example.com/effort.jpg);
     background-size: contain;
     background-repeat: no-repeat; 
     background-position: center; 
     background-color: black;
    }
    p,div,h1,span {display:none}

It's been 6 months and it's still working.

I did the same and it worked very well for me too. Redirect all dumb sites I don't really want to visit with a link to the quote I found inspiring at the time:

"It was a day like this when Marco Polo left for China. What are your plans for today ?"

I like the idea. Regarding the quote, I find it funny that people are not sure if Marco Polo ever left or he was just repeating stories he heard from other travelers.

I do this too. I use my app Sprinkles to do it. For Mac, you can inject your own js or css into any site.

https://github.com/mikker/sprinkles.app

That's just a first step, your muscle memory to open youtube.com for instant gratification requires time and motivation to go away. But the extra effort of having to disable an extension to fall into patterns you decidedly wanted to end is maybe enough to get you going.

I love this, I block sites during certain times to stop me wasting time but I might add this too.

What, did you edit your hosts file or something?

You can use Stylus for this.

https://github.com/openstyles/stylus

I assume it's a userscript in the Tampermonkey extension or the likes.

When I was doing a similar schedule, it was a failure of introspection, and a mounting number of unprocessed emotional issues, and unconfronted personal problems.

The way I got over it is that I have started realizing, confronting, communicating these issues. I "sat down with myself" daily just to think for 15 minutes, without any distraction like youtube. Communicated what I though were my problems to my partner, friends, parents, therapist, forums, LLM.

Over time, patterns emerged, either by others pointing them out to me, or them occurring to myself. The patterns became higher and higher level, and I had more and more power and agency to fill in my gaps, and those in turn made my problems smaller, manageable. Challenges, even.

I also picked up hobbies that nurture the specific parts that I was lacking. For example, I had a very hard time to persistently care about living things. But after a leap of faith I successfully kept a plant alive, and I slowly build a hobby around this.

Funnily enough, youtube helped in this, because I also shaped that so that the helpful videos remained. While doing chores, self-care and other such things, I listened to a lot of mental health, lifestyle, introspective, hobby content, and these were wonderful sources of inspiration.

In a way, having a bluetooth headphone also helped a lot. It helped to bridge the gap between the digital world, which was my only comfort zone, and the "irl", which was like the cold, hard, overwhelming rest of the world that I didn't really want to deal with.

Very illuminating.

> Over time, patterns emerged, either by others pointing them out to me, or them occurring to myself. The patterns became higher and higher level, and I had more and more power and agency to fill in my gaps, and those in turn made my problems smaller, manageable. Challenges, even.

Could you give some examples of those patterns?

Sure thing.

For example, my plants were always dying. I hated that, and I hated facing my inability every time I interacted with them (granted, there weren't many in the first place). I hated to touch soil and the general mess that happens when maintaining them. I was really disgusted by the way a rotten stem felt, how the soil stank after watering, and I was confused about where to put them, what to do with growth, browning leaves, etc. It was an overwhelming ball of negative emotions.

One time after multiple of them really died, I gave them new soil and vowed that this time I will really water regularly. I did, and they actually came back to life. I was very happy about it, and it inspired me to look up more information about them. That inspired me to have more plants, which in turn meant more work with them. I found youtubers I really liked who kept a lot of houseplants, and watching them normalized the chores for me, and helped me get an idea on how things actually look, and what it all takes. I began to have ideas about where I want to go with this. I dared things like repotting, buying different species, growing them from a small cutting. I went a little into interior design. I bought a plant nursery lamp. And the plants loved it!

The negative emotions all but went away, and positive ones gained traction - or I should rather say destructive and constructive. Behind hate and disgust I realized sadness and fear, and overcoming that I realized curiosity, stability, a warm pride toward myself and my creations.

I had a similar evolution in most other parts of my life, like relationships with people, relationship with animals, relationship with self.

Turned out from this all, the ingredient that I sorely missed was a courage to put myself out there. To find out what I am actually like, and to represent that genuinely in the different situations of life. This same pattern, fear of expressing myself, and repressing parts of me that I dislike or doubt, served as a foundation for many of my seemingly actual problems, like the inability to keep a little green thing alive, and so many more.

This is a good post, thanks for sharing.

I eschew social conventions, treat my goals with skepticism, and consider "learning" bogus if it's scholastic and isn't any fun. Thus I can do what I actually like, and the problem is solved.

I am cautious if anybody uses the word "healthy" outside of the context of actual diseases like pleurisy and conjunctivitis. I am aware of a below-the-radar societal battle over way of life, and proper conduct, and the battleground is haunted by specters of ideas like sin and saintliness. It's these fraught issues that cause "media addictions". The nature of the "addiction" is doubt and unhappiness over the thing you want to do, where the saintly walking-over-broken-glass things you imagine you ought to want are set against a reactionary avoidance of them, and the meaning of "want" is lost in the turmoil.

I haven't watched Youtube for ten years, but I will do other unproductive things "endlessly". (If anybody cares, I can report that the Backrooms mod on C:DDA has a layer of soil above the main level, and it's possible to break out into the open air and build a car up there. That's mostly what I did over the last two weeks.) I would like to be so firm in my convictions that I can say "and I don't care", but sadly I keep coming back to the idea that I should make some games, or write, or do art. Those are prestigious, pious things to do. It might turn out that my feelings are correct, and I might return to a project and complete it. But I might also be wrong about these self-aggrandizing ideas. I might keep coming back to appearing to be creative only as a kind of defense against appearing unworthy. I might actually idle my days away in a farty, unproductive manner unto death, and that might be what I should do. Whose moral standard is it here? Mine, yours, society's? "Do what you like", if you can wholeheartedly figure out what that means - that's the problem.

> I am cautious if anybody uses the word "healthy" outside of the context of actual diseases like pleurisy and conjunctivitis.

Just a digression: The word "healthy" comes from the root "hel", meaning "whole". So you can substitute it for "wholesome", and then we're not only dealing with bacteria and viruses, but the entire human experience.

You need to be in service of some other(s), and that’s about all there is to it.

YouTube is easy to block. Just clear all your history and disable history. This stops home screen recommendations and also disables YouTube shorts

I can recommend this. I'm sure it's a bug in the YouTube interface that they recommend literally nothing. My home screen has been completely empty for over a year, just a message saying "Your watch history is off". I have a couple subscriptions, which means a new video every so many days, which appear in the side bar, and they're still two or three clicks away, and that's perfect.

Not a bug, it was an explicit change they made about a year ago. I used to enjoy the recommendations based on my likes and they took that away.

It's not a bug, it's extremely passive aggressive. They couple it with rewriting their browser, working group recommendations, and legal lobbying to make shoving ads down your throat their basic "human" right. When I saw they did it to me, my response was, "great, game on".

I work every day with people addicted to YouTube. A WorkMode client shared this approach; we tested it with a small group. Anecdotal but consistent - it works surprisingly well, cuts usage sharply, and seems to hold up long-term.

Another option is use uBlock filter to hide recommendations while keeping subscription feed:

    youtube.com##:matches-path(/^\/?$/) #page-manager

I did this with both reddit and YouTube on my phone. That's how I beat the doom scrolling loop.

On Android for YT, I've installed the NewPipe app which can be configured to show no suggestions. I just have a list of app level subscribed channels, no yt account required

Yup, this is the way.

Regarding Shorts, I have no YouTube history, but I still get Shorts. I hate them. You must be doing something else to disable them.

Instead of using the YouTube app, I use the website on both my phone and computer. I have userscript setup to hide all shorts and community posts. Can be done easily with a CSS selector which sets it to:

    "display: none !important;"

Shorts are hell. I use FF Redirector plugin to gently save myself without restricting content, but there are other ways.

Redirect: *youtube.com/shorts/* to: $1youtube.com/watch?v=$2

Install the Freetube client (https://freetubeapp.io), then make the following configuration changes:

  1. In the left navbar, click "Settings > Distraction Free".
  2. Enable the "Subscriptions Page > Hide Subscription Shorts" switch.
  3. Enable the "Channel Page > Hide Channel "Shorts" Tab" switch.

You get Shorts shown in search and in your subscriptions, but the "Shorts" tab in the mobile app leads to a black page.

Thank you - did not know this existed.

I'm finding the blank youtube page incredibly soothing already!

highly recommend that as well. Disabling history greatly reduced my time spent in the app. UnTrap plugin for Safari helps as well. Can't say that I feel like I spend a reasonable amount of time on the platform still, but now it's mostly me having an urge to distract myself, opening the website and finding the videos I have seen already then closing the tab.

I also do that; open the site and look for content. I have enough subscriptions to always be able to find something. Yet somehow not falling into the Shorts attention trap is what saves my time.

Yea, I have mine disabled too.

It's also easy to stop smoking. Just avoid anything that looks or feels like smoking. Problem solved! /s

Addiction is like a weed in the ground. Cutting off its head just makes it regrow faster and angrier, with deeper roots to boot.

Addictions love nothing more than superficial attempts to stop them! The only way to _manage_ addictions is to get them at their roots.

And even if you pull out the issue with the whole root, you have to fill it with something worthwhile, nurturing, and sustainable to you. Otherwise the hole will get filled by the next best time-wasting activity.

I've come to accept unproductive downtime as a counterbalance to highly focused times. If it becomes too extreme, the best bet is to unplug totally. Schedule some tasks out of the house, preferably in nature.

Before you begin, take some time to outline the tasks you need to complete. Now when you return to the home office, you are only there for one reason.

If problems persist, you may need to find more interesting projects.

It sounds like you're working 8 hours/day and unwinding the rest of the time?

I never had energy for side projects with a full-time job. Just because some do doesn't mean it's for everyone.

Maybe there are higher value ways to relax than doom scrolling but I don't think being "unproductive" beyond 8 hrs/day is a bad thing.

Hopefully you can also find work that is stimulating and gives that sense of accomplishment.

For the distractions, one thing that helps me is removing easy access to them.

Just like having junk food in the house means that I will tend to eat junk food (but I won't go buy junk food on impulse)...

* Remove the time-wasting capabilities from your devices (e.g., uninstall apps, set up uBlock Origin blocking rules for anything TikTok-like, block HN for a week).

* Make dedicated distraction devices hard to access (e.g., unplug gaming rig/console and store it away for a week/month, same with the living room TV/screen, sell that handheld gaming device).

Also, once you get some momentum on a better activity, it's easier to stay doing it. You might have to lock away all your distractions for a few days before you can get immersed in that coding side project (or writing that novella, or that new workout routine). But then it can become a go-to activity that you do automatically, and maybe even think about at other times, rather than defaulting to doomscrolling.

(I don't claim to always do this myself, but when I do, it works.)

Despite the title, I don't think YouTube is the main issue... You can replace it with tiktok, twitter, your favorite video game, watching TV... and that still sounds unproductive and unhealthy. In fact, I'd rate short videos and fragmented social media content worse digital distractions than YouTube.

To help me disconnect, I set my phone to turn on power saving, grayscale, dark mode, and max redshift after 11 PM. It makes it so annoying to use that I can just put it down.

Don't worry too much about being unproductive outside working hours. Worry about unhealthy habits that will eventually harm your productivity.

First step is recognizing the problem. It'll now be easier to recognize when you've slipped into that mode and stop.

Second step is breaking the habit. Literally, you need to start spending that time on something else. Your behavioral autopilot automatically gravitates to browsing Youtube - you need to rewire that to something else. For some reason it's really difficult the first couple of times and then gets easier.

Third step, once you're starting to feel like you've made it out, is understanding that there are circumstances out of your control that will lead you back into those old habits. Maybe work was draining or relationship problems hit - whatever it is, you'll feel like you deserve a break. You need to recognize those moments and have a plan ready for those moments. You absolutely deserve that break, but falling back into that habit is literally self-sabotage, and you'll feel worse after.

Fourth step, rinse and repeat. I've never made it past this step.

Install the Freetube client at home ( https://freetubeapp.io ) and stop relying on YouTube's shitty algorithm to provide you with content. Go in search of the content you want... it's more work, but you're gonna find yourself happier with the end results.

I don't, I spend hours on YouTube every day even though I care very little about the content I watch and mostly do it just to hear some familiar voices in my head. Then I feel bad about it, go to bed, have terrible sleep, wake up with barely any energy to even get out of bed, and the cycle begins anew.

How I manage to actually get enough work done to keep my job is some kind of a miracle, I guess. I've long given up on personal projects or even anime and games. Everything requires too much energy that I don't seem to be able to find, so the comfort zone of YouTube or similar time wasters it is (browsing HN is my latest one, with all due respect to some of the really useful content on this website).

All I can say is, try not to be me if you can help it. Vicious cycle, this. Some find therapy or medication helpful, could be worth considering.

I can relate. I've made some changes in my life that helped avoid Youtube.

The single most effective thing I did was during my week off when I put my phone in a drawer and mostly stuck to my apple watch for notifications and a keycard for my car.

Obviously I need my phone for work, so I've been trying other things to reduce its importance in my life.

I moved the TV from the room with the sofas to the room with chairs. I wind up spending more time in conversation with my wife or my friends on those sofas, rather than "Hey check out this video I saw..".

I've also replaced my phone with my watch for stuff involving unlocking car, and using a mostly-offline Linux handheld device with custom apps to replace stuff on my phone. You'd be surprised how many things don't require internet access; books and videos can be cached, and other things (paying credit cards, etc..) can be done on a desktop.

It's not for me but for my kid, but YouTube got banned in our house.

However, we really missed two channels - Zebra Gamer and Art For Kids Hub.

Actually, she missed more than that, but I didn't think the other channels she missed were really good for her - think annoying gamers with questionable behavior whose content is clearly trying to gain your attention every 15 seconds with insane alert sounds. (Just in case you're looking at a second screen instead of them? idunno folks, but it's unbearable to me).

So I made a script that downloads all the content on the selected channels beyond a certain date (all of it was too much to store), and I serve it on a Jellyfin server.

No algorithm, no unlimited content to browse, just a large but finite selection of content from a selected list of channels (only 2 in our case!) which only updates when I run the script.

Disable history.

When it is disabled the yt screen will not contain any recommendations and will actually be empty. After you do this, you'll find yourself dozing off to yt on occasion and reaching a blank screen only to realize you didn't actually come to watch something specific but more as a force of habit and you'll lose the trigger. I recommended this to a couple of friends of mine and they all say it worked wonders.

I'm not sure if you only have to disable history or some other options as well, but basically you want a blank screen when you reach yt. You can still have subscriptions, but the idea is that you intentionlly look for what you want to watch instead of having the yt screen recommendations offering videos and you choosing.

Oddly enough, Youtube is not among my many addictions. I'm mainly interested in technical topics and can't stand watching a n-minutes videos when I can read a blog with more detailed info in n/10 minutes. For very very VERY interesting topics, I may ask some LLM to summarize the video for me.

Have a purpose. When you're gungho to do something or get something done, and you have tremendous drive to do that and not procrastinate. Do something you enjoy.

Here's a test for you.

If I were to offer you $10 million to do anything you want during your day, what would you do? Would you accept the money? Of course you would.

What if the consequence of accepting was that you don't wake up tomorrow morning? Obviously you say no. But you just found out waking up in the morning is worth more than $10 million.

My approach is slightly different. If someone offered you, say, 10k USD every day you put in efforts to achieve your personal goals, and they gave you a condition that there should be no days off, would you turn up every day for the 10k dollars or would you let your distractions win?

I bet you'd do what you have to do for the daily 10k dollars, like reading a book, going to the gym, etc.

But since nobody is offering us money we let our distractions win because we don't want to achieve our goals bad enough!

https://www.rxjourney.net/how-badly-do-you-want-it

Go full North Korea at home. This means building your own parallel universe of culture. This means music you don't have to stream, books you don't have to stream, video that you don't have to stream and some reference works such as a dictionary.

No WiFi or mobile phone data allowance means you have to leave the door every time you want anything on your phone or computer. You would be surprised by how well this works. If you download something to watch later as you go shopping in an actual store on their WiFi, you can get your emails and messages from apps download at the same time.

Keep a list of things you need to use your favourite search engine for, and just work the list when you are in town.

You would be surprised at how easy it is to go all day Sunday with no data.

Obviously if you are work from home, this won't work. Being contactable primarily by phone or SMS works great for friendships, it is good to talk and more of that gets done if you go fully North Korea.

You can also go further to make your home a sanctuary, keeping it clean with shoes off at the door is a start, keeping only healthy food is another way to get that serene vibe that you desire.

I saw this amish documentary and how they still need to use some modern tech to do their work. One of the people had a cellphone that they only use in a tiny shack a bit of walk from their home, so it adds a lot of friction.

Install the browser extension Unhook. It hides all recommended YouTube videos, so when you watch a video you aren't looking at a bunch of other videos to watch. It's very customizeable, so you can choose what to hide.

Create a list of what you want to be doing and consider attaching it to your monitor or putting it just to the side so that you can easily look at it. When you feel stuck, look at this list and do something on the list. Ensure the list includes some easy to do things on it like maybe "go for a walk", "read a book", "play instrument" etc.

When trying to change habits, start off small and simple. For example, if you want to start running each day you might start by putting on your running shoes and walking to the end of the driveway and back. Start off so small that your brain can't talk you out of it.

I create daily todo lists and feel satisfaction from checking them off.

Try some ideas and see what works for you. Good luck!

Go to the gym. Start a social hobby like salsa dancing or a casual team sport like kickball/cornhole/flag football/bowling etc. Join a run club. Do active social activities. Stick with them and don't get discouraged when you're new at it.

I am a huge procrastinator, so I have to do some elaborate stuff to get myself to do things. Anxiety producing methods don't work very well because I just feel overwhelmed and that doesn't help things. The best technique I've found that consistently works is to write down the things I have to do today in my phone and to close my eyes and visualize getting them done repeatedly. I imagine myself doing the actions one after another that I need to do to complete the task. I do it multiple times in a loop until I lose my fear of it. I write down the steps if it's long and I can't keep it in my short term memory and go through that.

Set goals; prioritize; follow the list in fuzzy, reasonable sequential order.

The recipe is, and has always been, to delay gratification. Duty comes first.

Wrote about this! https://www.rxjourney.net/how-to-be-more-productive

Delete your watch history and switch off watch history - then you get no recommendations on the home page.

That's a nice balance for me - it leaves more options than completely blocking it but it protects me from being bounced around by the algorithm.

By not watching it.

I know how I sound, but... For me it's the only approach possible. I cannot moderate myself. The only way for me is to quit cold turkey.

For many websites, I had to attempt this many times because I would fail. But I don't see any other way.

1. Don’t work from home. Even if you are working for a fully remote company, get a personal office.

2. Have a laptop or desktop that only has a command line on it. Don’t carry your normal laptop along.

3. Don’t carry your phone. Instead invest in an Apple Watch with cellular or something similar for emergency calling. Have a regular old landline for your office.

4. Invest in specialized devices such as kindles and zoom meeting devices.

1-2 months of this will help change your default behavior of needing to satisfy your frequent dopamine demands immediately. Slowly introduce other devices.

Sports. I do 2h of strength training every Mon/Wed/Fri. You work with barbell, not machines. Requires all your mental and physical focus. That pretty much will soak up any “free” after-work time you have on those days. Then on Tue/Thu you can do social activities. Any time spent not working/sport/social activities I spend “whatever” which means watching a show, reading a book or doom scrolling - but it won’t a lot of time left for it. And honestly at that point you probably have a pretty well balanced life that “doom scrolling” is not an issue.

I know what you are going through and what helped me is taking extreme measures.

You have to first do a dopamine detox...you mention YouTube but it's usually a lot more than that. You probably addicted to a lot of other stuff (like porn, food, sugar, TikTok). You need to give your brain a break from the over stimulation.

what does this look like? get rid of all your electronics except what is essential. for me this is just my phone, kindle and laptop. as soon as I get home my phone goes in an electronic time lock box and its locked until next morning. on my laptop everything is blocked like YouTube and only the stuff essential is available (I'm on my Mac I use an app called SelfControl). get rid of your junk food and eat wholesome home made meals. replace YouTube with other interests you have always wanted to do preferably something that doesn't require electronics like drawing or reading or playing an instrument

After 30-60 days you feel a lot better and more at peace with yourself. at this point you have a decision to make, can I go back to where and keep it under control or do I need to make this the rest of my life. for me I chose an analog life and I avoid electronics as much as possible. I use instagram and YouTube but I have iOS timers on them so it's blocked after my allowed time runs out.

Agreed. I'm currently in a regressed state but a few times I've successfully done this and it changes life. Extremely locked down screen time rules are necessary - break the exciting loop of picking up your phone, eventually you'll re-associate the phone when each time you pick it up you're met with disappointment that nothing exciting is allowed.

Life just slows down in a way that allows you to appreciate little things, make better decisions and treat people with more empathy, read more, reflect on life, get better sleep. ADHD is easier to manage. Less decision fatigue and general mental fatigue (I personally feel that scrolling/youtube are not mentally refreshing and leave me just as if not more drained after).

The danger is in letting yourself slip. It's a very quick slope and brain chemicals are usually stronger than our willpower. Even knowing how much better life is during these periods, I'm still currently in a down cycle because I'm struggling to find the energy to make the right choices. Work can also be draining which takes away good choice energy later in the evening.

It boils down to unconscious habits/patterns.

What worked for me was to install an Android app called Regain. It asks for how much time will you use while opening an app, like 5 minutes, 1 minute or 3 minutes or maximum time in a session. And then I also used another app called Farhan. So it gives you a reminder and a pop-up that you have scrolled something for like continuous 5 minutes or 10 minutes. You can set the timer. Both of these apps made me change my habits and now I don't have that much urge even without these apps.

I have uninstalled these apps. But I can now choose not to play anything on YouTube or Reddit or Telegram. And I also like I keep YouTube history off so it doesn't show me anything like that. And I try to use third-party YouTube apps like FreeTube. So that doesn't show suggestions, recommendations if you like. That can also block certain channels, shorts also. And I try to use every new browser wherever possible. That helps.

On laptop, I use News Feed Eradicator and Leechblock. You just have to use them to break your unproductive habits, that you can uninstall them.

I was heavily addicted to Twitter and Reddit. Not anymore.

1. Buy a Bloom card or similar device.

2. Block ALL algorithmic feed apps AND websites on your phone using the card/device (tiktok, instagram, facebook, youtube, etc.. even linkedin).

3. Set a 24 hr block schedule, no breaks. No half measures. Go hard mode. Cold turkey.

4. Leave the card / access device in your car or somewhere not easily reachable in your home.

5. Install social focus extension on your computer browser.

6. Sometimes you will fail. That’s ok, start over and keep trying every single day.

7. Finally burn out and seek professional help.

8. Discover you were living life in hard mode, while everybody else were on easy mode. You had undiagnosed ADHD all these years.

9. Get medicated. Your life is completely turned over.

(At least this was how it was for me.)

If your addiction has gotten this far, it's time to start labeling it as just that, and there's no shame in it.

At a certain point you need to accept that you will not be able to willpower your way out of it. You need systems and strategies in place that cut you off from your addiction.

That can look like a lot of things that I'm not going to try to stuff into an HN comment but here's what works for me:

- Leaving the house with a dumb phone. I recommend using an old smartphone that is meticulously stripped away from bad things over purchasing a flip phone. You're eventually going to need to call up an uber, scan a QR code, and other such smartphoney things you need a dumb phone to do. Leaving your environment is also key. If you must, bring your actual phone with you, but fully powered off.

- Using a feature on your phone to cut yourself off from YouTube on a scheduled basis. Most phones have something like this by default, but there are also some third party apps that take it a step further.

- Have something you enjoy to take the place of YouTube. Entertainment is healthy to an extent. Taken too far, it becomes a distraction from cognitive processes you need to be regularly engaging in, to say the least.

There's a lot of advice here about using technical means to block youtube. If that works for you and solves your problem then fantastic. I am genuinely happy for you.

However, I suspect it won't. It never worked for me.

Firstly, any blocker you setup yourself you can take down yourself. You might find that it works for a day or two but then you feel really awful and binge youtube even more than normal.

Secondly, blocking tools are a tacit acknowledgment that you have given up and can't control yourself. "My willpower is just too bad. There's no way I can control myself. I need a tool to do it for me." This is the opposite of the feeling your want to cultivate. You want to feel more in control of yourself and your actions and be able to direct your attention accordingly.

Unfortunately, there are no silver bullets. There is no one little trick that will solve everything for you. That said, there are things you can do that will help a lot.

Get in touch with your emotions. Find out what triggers send you to youtube. Here's an example for me:

Think about important essay that is due soon --> worry and dread about academic performance --> watch youtube to forget about it.

This is probably happening in a blink of an eye. Probably so quickly that you don't even notice. If you can start noticing and naming your emotions you can deal with them more constructively.

Positive emotions can be triggers too.

I'm so excited about this new hobby I'm into --> I'm going to research it on youtube --> 3 hours watching videos about painting but not doing any painting.

Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with this. But if you can notice the emotions you can start to redirect them and work with them.

I've had the same... and been doing therapy for years and feel like I'm 80% recovered.

It's all dopamine, it's probably messed up in your brain. It made you do a lot of things and achieve where you are, but it has too many CPU cycles in your brain for you to lead a (mental) healthy life.

I know the feeling. It isn't about Youtube per-se, but the fact you do this and regret later, so yes, it is an addiction and bad for you.

You likely have a lot of entangled thoughts about yourself, some which are indeed, yours and more of your nature, and also others that are not your own desires.

If you didn't regret it and as you lead a normal life, it's alright.

Why do you regret, is it because you ultimately would like to achieve something big or certain goal, or is it because you envy others sending rockets to space?

Only a professional, a psychologist can help you to find this out.

They can also help you to find ways of breaking apart those habits that take you in front of Youtube, and find new ideas or things you'd really like to do instead, even if they don't lead to immediate dopamine shots.

The best advice I got on breaking a bad habit is that you can't do it by ordering yourself "don't do X" which takes will power and teeth-gritting effort. Any success with this method will fail over time. The problem is that it is like telling yourself to not think about pink elephants which makes you think about pink elephants.

So the trick is to set the rule [don't do X, do Y instead] and immediately stop thinking about X and move on to Y. Just shut down the "do X" thought and shift to Y. "Y" can be anything even the absurd like patting the top of your head 5 times because it breaks your subconscious programming. In fact, the absurd Y's seem to be more effective BECAUSE they a silly or ridiculous. Of course, as you gain skill at this method you can start using more productive Y's like doing 10 pushups or do a quick household chore, do a small task on your to-do list, etc. Once the subconscious program is broken then thoughts to do X will fade and you can move on to X2 that you want to change.

For channels I care about, I subscribed to the channel's RSS feed.

For instance, there's an RSS feed at https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections/videos.

I combined this with the Distraction Free YouTube browser extension that worked really well — no recommendations would display on the home page or on an individual video page.

So I'd only look at the videos that came through my RSS reader, and I'd see no other recommendations on YouTube — in and out. There are trade offs. I'd miss out on content that I'd probably be interested in. I trusted that if there was something interesting enough, a friend would tell me.

The extension broke when YouTube started cracking down on ad blockers. I still get alerted to new videos in my RSS reader. Except now, I get sucked into recommended content sometimes when I watch a video.

I think I just realized in typing this that I need to find another extension like DF YouTube.

Found a uBlock Origin filter list that seems to work reasonably well:

https://github.com/BevizLaszlo/UBlock-Filters-for-Social-Med...

This may not be helpful, but I have found it difficult to limit screentime. Tried it many times, never sustained it. "Fastening" for a week or two was much easier and had sustained effects. See other comments on how to lock yourself out of YouTube. For me it was just a matter of disabling the app on my phone, but it does not seem to be that easy for everyone.

I used to spend a lot of time on TikTok unconsciously every day—around 2 to 3 hours. By the time I realized it, the time had already passed! I don’t know how many people have the same problem as me. When I became aware of it, I started reading. Now I spend about half an hour to an hour every day reading. Reading helps me start thinking and brings me a sense of calm.

Also, here’s a small tip: I like to read the text out loud while reading. This makes it easier for me to get into the reading state (sometimes speaking the words is a way to let my inner self really “see” them).

Later, I often wondered how many people might have the same problem as me. That gave me an idea—to create a video aggregation website that mainly shares good-quality videos beneficial for personal growth. Now, I’d love to hear how many friends might have a similar need!

- turn off your watch history to disable suggested videos. It wipes out your Home Screen and turns off shorts so YouTube is just what you’ve subscribed for

- if on desktop, get a browser extension (or code one yourself with an AI) to turn off all the bits on YouTube like like count and comments. This makes the video content you’ve subscribed for the main content. No getting distracted reading comments

- curate your suggestions and only sub to things you care about

- get rid of the YouTube app on your phone and only use the browser version on mobile.

Kicking YouTube isn’t on my priority list but I don’t want it to consume my life like it has in the past. There’s value on that platform if you can interact with it consciously. I’ve implemented these suggestions in my own life and it’s helped rein in my YouTube time. Good luck!

You can approach this from different "zoom levels". In the narrow sense, disable recommendations for channels that are the most useless timesinks with irresistible titles and thumbnails that you find annoying in retrospect. You can click the three dots and click "Don't recommend this channel". Similarly you can click that you're not interested in a recommendation. This will make the main page less of a candy store. uBlock origin can help hide Shorts and other annoyances.

Still, you may then do something else that can also be considered a distraction, like refreshing the news, or Reddit or HN. So the more "global" approach is to look at your life setup and figure out why you feel the need to fill time like this.

Put a restriction on your router or on a pi-hole and put the settings behind a big password. Then write the password down and give it to a friend/colleague and tell them to only give you the password out of hours.

This was definitely one of the most important discoveries of my PhD.

I have a procrastination problem. but when the work really needs to get done one of the things that helps me is to set smaller time frames using the pomodoro technique. this way you do focused work for 25 mins, then take a break for 5 and so on. 25 mins may not look much at the beginning, but focused work in those 25 mins 4-5 times a day can actually get the work done much better than loitering around for 5-6 hours with no focus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique

I find when I'm doing this the work feels overwhelming. So I'm doing it to alternate between stressful / overwhelming task, and some relief. I do this because of an inner critic that's being too harsh about my work. I need a break from that critic, so I go do something meaningless / and easier.

I wouldn't shame yourself for doing this. Contrary to popular belief, I think a lot of people alternate between non-work and work for similar reasons.

In fact this kind of going back and forth is one of the only ways I've gotten anything done

(1) Use ublock origin to block reels, comment section and other features

(2) Wipe history and only watch productive topics on your account. Watch all other videos on incognito - I set up violentmonkey scripts to help. Here's a cool secret: your feed will ONLY be related to the videos in your history. My feed is now ONLY ML and music

(3) Delete the app on the phone. Only use youtube through firefox (if you have android) which allows the ublock extension

(4) Alternatives like newpipe helped before I stumbled onto this solution

You still need a little willpower. Find the strength to not use youtube for 3 weeks. Then it becomes much easier

Edit: clarity

I encourage you to watch this video which shows how procrastination is often, even most likely, a product of self-protection, https://youtu.be/mi8LU79NukI?si=qkfX7mQaWsDoolgT

I encourage you to check out this video on procrastination which shows how the issue is related to struggles with self-worth: https://youtu.be/mi8LU79NukI?si=qkfX7mQaWsDoolgT

I find YouTube kinda baffling; I never really had any use for it (I will occasionally use it to watch an old music video, but that's about it), but some people do seem to get really properly addicted to it.

Are you using it to watch people you subscribe to, or things it suggests to you, or something else? If you're primarily going on its suggestions, you might want to try using an extension to block that; social media suggestion thingies are very much _designed_ to hook people.

For the first time in months, I'm occupied enough to not even think of Youtube, and when I look at it in the evening nothing appeals to me (the opposite). When I scroll on shorts, I just feel dissatisfied and close them.

But generally, I'm on there hours a day, enjoying none of it. Shorts, long videos, etc. I do the same with the front page of Reddit, even though 99% of the posts there bother me. If I block those, it's Hacker News, Facebook, or even LinkedIn. Ultimately, I think a lot of compulsions and addictions, technology or otherwise, come from a lack of purpose or joy in life.

I use RSS Guard as local RSS feed manager, and I've slapped all my channels in there. No more reliance on "The Algorithm", and I can now see how freaking many channels I actually follow. I can now start cutting into the spammers, those that don't put out content at all, etc.

Also using Firefox with "Youtube-shorts block", which turns a short into a normal video, so I can't start doom-scrolling.

It cut procrastination-times down enough where I now feel I can program again.

A couple of things that have been effective for me:

1) Block said online service using the hostfile until addiction becomes manageable / goes away. Repeat as needed.

2) For work, keep a notebook. Review and set goals at the start of each day or week. Review and update notes / goals at the end of each day and week. Your own agenda, your game to keep yourself motivated.

Now, since your addiction is blocked and you have something to do, you'll at least get it done before turning to your addiction to kill time / unwind.

Adding youtube (and other services) to /etc/hosts so they won’t load works for me. I also noticed when I’m sleep deprived even slightly, I procrastinate way more.

Go to /r/nosurf to read about it and see that you are not alone.

The short answer is the only things that do help are:

- therapy and medication to help stabilize and strenghten your emotion Control

- going cold turkey on addictions , removing them entirely for at least 30 days. This must be hard removal, not apps that block stuff but can be circumvented. Removal of block should be as hard as it can be

- go for 12-steps internet addicts anonymous groups. 12 steps are proven to work

- find a new hobby when going for 30days cold turkey, plan it like vacation

I deleted all my socials more than a decade ago and never looked back, to be honest it's expensive, this august I've spent a lot of money going out almost every day, but I also think it's because it's hard to stay in when outside the weather is great, also gym was closed, but I think getting rid of social completely it's the only way to go, when they are engineered to monopolise your time, there is no limiting

Go to the gym. Physical exercise will do wonders for mental an physical help.

You can still listen to podcasts and YouTube whe on the treadmill or listen to your favourite albums.

As a coder myself i always thought gym wasn’t for me but i finally tried and i wish i started 20 years ago.

I’m now a better person i have less time for distractions and everything i do including watching youtube i do with more focus and purpose.

If you have too much time in your hands its easy to waste.

Go to gym!

I built a small plugin that sends you to your reading list whenever you open a common time-sink site. It’s been a simple but effective way to avoid slipping into distraction.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/detour/ogddhmpffcgk...

Exercise may help. Some people are naturally low in "focus" biochemicals -- so exercise can boost your levels of those biochemicals.

Exercise also helps you sleep better -- sleep issues can also interfere with focus. And eating right is probably helpful too. It's the advice they give everybody who needs more energy -- but I think it can all be especially helpful for focus issues.

Biological factors like maintaining adequate blood sugar level (intentional living requires bioenergetic resources) are important.

I cant answer for Youtube addiction, but for procrastination, I often have simplify what I have to do so it isnt too overwhelming. Instead of thinking i have to accomplish some huge goal, I tell myself to just to focus on this one simple task instead and ignore everything else

If you have an android phone try one of the blocking apps. I found "Stay Focused" to be very efficient. With strict mode i wasn't able to circumvent it any other way.

In general with all forms of addiction: your mind is crazy good coming up with excuses. So give the key to change your setup to someone else. E.g root access :)^^

I feel you. Personally, I just have too much going on. It’s making me feel tired mentally, and I just want to tune in and drop out. Come Monday, I regret having not done this or that, more productive, thing. I say go with the flow. When I’m ready, I’ll just not want to doom scroll Reddit. Haha.

I just block it in phone and only access it in PC. And only open youtube when you have intention e.g. finding tutorial or listen to the latest news or podcasts. Avoid shorts at all costs.

I use the Add-In "Un-trap for youtube". It can block recommendations, redirect the main page to your watch-later-list and disable shorts, among many other things. It doesn't solve the core of the problem by itself of course. Sometimes I find myself procrastinating here instead...

I just started creating my own bad content instead of consuming others bad content. It feels more productive.

I'm so burnt out from "trying to do more" I'm actively procrastinating because I have no more emotional energy due to circumstance. You might be in the same boat. Giving yourself a break is okay too,you might then get bored of it and do something cool.

Create a todo list and try to complete it each day. We waste hours every day on our phones doing nothing productive.

https://www.rxjourney.net/how-to-be-more-productive

It helps to clarify your goals and what it is you want to do with your life, otherwise you’ll always have this ambiguous sense that you’re not progressing in the way that you want.

What do you mean by “productive”? What would progress look like for you? And towards what?

Since you are already on youtube.. watch the HealthyGamer.gg videos. Here is one on procrastination: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBifDZwPiI4

Delete the account and delete the app. You don't need YouTube or social media. Replace it with real social interactions and nature. It will suck for a few weeks until your brain re-adjusts. But it's totally worth it.

Never subscribe to any channels

Install browser plugins like UnHook - which let you disable/hide many things like shorts, sidebar, etc

Uninstall the Youtube app on your phone

Turn off youtube history and have google delete all the history

Go back to old hobbies like art, music, etc or find new hobbies

I’m in a similar rut. For me, it seems to be a response to changes at work, where I don’t know why we’re doing anything we’re being told to do, and if all feels quite meaningless. My response has unfortunately been a mental shutdown.

I have found that a useful method for getting distractions off my work laptop has been https://selfcontrolapp.com/ (if you're on mac).

I had Youtube addiction. Around three hours a day. Now I use Android's Digital Wellbeing app to reduce it. I have blocked social media apps 10pm to next day 12pm and only 1 hours of usage allowed.

I have hobbies that don't involve a computer or phone. Some of my hobbies do involve computers, but it's a lot easier to avoid distraction in those that don't.

Do you like your job? Do you feel fulfilled by it? That's where I would start.

I also recommend therapy. This could be a symptom of something more complex in your life that you don't fully understand yet.

Flip phone solve it at work.

My version of this is to have a smart watch as my main device during work, with the phone switched off and locked away.

I created a side project to deal with this, but honestly, I’m doing a bit of rewrite and it should be considered beta.

https://scrolldaddy.app

Same as any addiction - find a reason to stop running away from life.

Schedule other activities. If you are merely being restrictive, you might find yourself sitting there obsession about what you aren't consuming but reflexively want to.

Going outside facilitates this

I make specific achievable plans to do something else instead. Preferably things that leave me with a sense of accomplishment. Even dumb things like taking a walk or cleaning something.

Well what would you consider a worthwhile activity that you're not currently doing / doing enough of. It's more so a question of why you aren't doing that

This was even a real problem back in 2007 !!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KozkP0mHjQ

I've turned off my history on all logged in profiles, to get YouTube not giving me recommendations! I had a constant humm of YouTube content in my background during work. So when I was offered due to the EU to turn off my recommendations by turning off history I grabbed the offer. It is just enough for me to make my YouTube consumption intentional and avoid it. I've experimented with having a non-logged in browser with recommendations but occasionally it manages to find my poison, so after I nuke the cookies it is back to intentional usage of YouTube there too. Because the worst part of the YouTube, it gives you useful stuff that improves your life, but it also just sucks you into a black hole of content.

Also it is true that these things with procrastination and addictive behaviors are very much emotional issues and so on... and in my case whenever I notice that I'm avoiding dealing with my emotions and the hard stuff with YouTube content black holes I do the resets.

Good luck

Remove the YouTube app from all devices. Block the YouTube site with an ad blocker.

Done.

99% of all content on YouTube is crap anyway. Better things to do with your time.

Turns out that the future was better pocket TV

YouTube is mostly ads even with an adblocker and while many great videos also exist most of them are low quality..

Other than putting screen timers on all my apps, I've found that physically leaving my phone in other rooms to be helpful. Also recognizing it as a problem and acknowledging "Agh, I'm doing it again" when I get caught in a doom scroll hole at least puts some counterweight to the problem.

I also keep my laptop by my couch so I reach for it vs my phone. I hate typing on my phone so I end up just clicking on a dopamine drip app rather than actual reading / work which I tend to do more readily on a laptop or desktop.

It is a behavioural problem at the end of the day. Which means it will take discipline and accepting some feelings of discomfort up front to change for the long term.

Get help from a friend or friends that will help hold you accountable to staying off YouTube.

You might want to get screened for adhd. You might just be fighting an uphill battle.

I really don't think everyone with a social media addiction has ADHD.

Yes, that's on the experts to decide. But still valuable to rule it out.

True but dopamine cycling is correlated with ADHD.

Your routine seems completely normal. This is Not Youtube addiction and procrastination. You work 8 hours - that's already your productivity. The idea that your personal time also needs to be optimized and highly productive is tech bro nonsense.

After a full workday, your brain wants easy dopamine. That is being human. You're not a startup. The people posting about 5am routines are just performing productivity online.

Maybe go to bed earlier or be more mindful when it comes to digital dooms scroll.

Install an ad-blocker and google will cut you off. win-win.

You could use a firefox extension called BlockTube. You can still access Youtube but it’ll hide certain videos based on channel name, keywords in videos, etc.

For example, I have “Trump” or “Musk” to block any video with these keywords in the video title.

If you click on a share link video and those keywords appear, it’ll just show a black screen.

You are weak and aimless, because being aimless makes you weak.

When you look at life, ask yourself what brings you most joy in life, what makes you feel most alive, find your direction, and avoid the petty traps designed to enslave you.

Find your discipline, challenge yourself, and find like-minded people without your phone as a filter. The cost of social connection increases exponentially with malign influences as it becomes digital. Learn the education and related skills of discernment which have been purposefully withheld from recent generations. Seek and base your actions on actual truth, not rhetoric.

The first step is recognition of the compulsion traps that have been set for you to enslave you to addiction.

Read a book, Robert Cialdini's "Influence", and you will begin to recognize the subtle factors in your own psychology that allow others to manipulate you towards detrimental ends without your knowledge.

Learn about what specifically defines torture, so you can recognize and eliminate such torturous and vexatious things from your life as intolerable.

Most of the things people have been brought up to believe today are true only in the narrowest of respects, and in a broader perspective are lies of omission, designed to blind you.

Evil didn't stop existing, people were just induced to willfully choose to be blind to it with carefully crafted convincing lies, and technique, and systematic indirect interference to tie you down leaving you without agency.

Reclaim your cultural heritage whatever culture that may be, and prepare yourself for the dark times that are ahead, which may move slowly but are coming.

Without joy, partnership, children, a future, there is nothing. If you aren't moving forward towards that, you are moving backward.

Hmm what else are you planning on doing? Start there

Do you like your job? Do you feel aligned with it?

You work too much.

Stop looking at streamers on youtube live!

unhook chrome/brave plugin, you can disable youtube from showing you everything expect specific video you searched for

It will sound cliché, but if dark thoughts come to you, if you start feeling like whatever else than Youtube is worthless, etc... it might we worth finding someone qualified to listen.

If it's mild, and you just fell like you're too easily drawn into whatever the algo feeds you, well... it means the dopamine dealers at Alphabet are doing their job "right". Your job is know to try and cure the addiction.

This is not like "spending you days on cable TV" - YT has infinite content, with no occasion for boredom. Everything is always going to be 100% interesting, captivating, infuriating, etc... And if it's not, the "next" rush is a click away. Your brain is fighting an unfair battle.

Thankfully, "cold turkey" should not have any critical downside, so you could try.

Just being mindfull of how long you spend can help.

Leechblock NG has a helpful mode where you just restrict how long you can spend, before being locked. [1]

Any extension that removes the "suggestion", "shorts", etc... would put you in a better spot. I use Enhancer for Youtube for that [2].

I also find that many of the most interesting youtubers happen to be on nebula.tv, which clearly is way less designed for binge and addiction. [3]

And of course the usual stuff apply - find something or someone so great that you're rather spend time with them that on YT.

Also, at some point, I hope someone will run on a platform of "not letting advertisers completely rot people's brain for a few clicks". Even meth dealers have to sleep and watch they back.

Good luck !

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/leechblock-ng...

[2] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/enhancer-for-youtub...

[3] https://nebula.tv/featured

i’ve used freedom.to at times to just turn off all distractions, works pretty well

I installed Cold Turkey

It's been as simple as closing the tab and not opening YouTube again. I quit some other sites/games this way if I felt that they annoyed me. HN is what I have left still. Maybe you don't despise YouTube enough?

Use pomodoro

I wish I had YouTube addiction- there's little good to watch lately.

Youtube Enshitification, as it became more polished and commercial.

Find higher quality slop to fill your time. HN or TPOT, for instance.

I wrote bingeblock.com to deal with stuff like this. It kicks you off sites by domain name with no opportunity for snoozing. You set a daily limit in minutes and then you get exactly that. That way you can still access useful sites from time to time without getting sucked into them.

I think Screentime does something similar on iOS so you could try that too but there wasn't anything I could find for Linux.