How to stop random scrolling. Beating the YouTube addiction or Making a Mini University
- Magical Mindful Living
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
I was addicted. I am addicted. YouTube is not just an app. It's a notorious addiction. Just like drugs. Just like cocaine. But if we understand the mechanism of YouTube addiction there are simple strategies we can use. Same traits of YouTube which make it an addiction can be used to overcome the mindless scrolling. Instead utilized to give a value to our time.
It was a long time ago that I wrote about Hook method. It is the mechanism utilized for these highly addictive apps, to get human consciousness hooked again and again. If you need to understand basics you can read that article here. But in this article, I am going to give you a practical way of beating YouTube addiction.
On YouTube Addiction
Watching YouTube videos are not going to be very productive. Mostly they are made to hook our natural curiosity to learn new things. Infact, a YouTube short of 10 seconds is a great example. It is unlikely you learn some significant thing looking at a 10 second video. It's just entertainment. However, the addictive nature to these 10 second clips can keep you glued to the phone for hours and hours. If you forget the fact that an hour is just a collection of seconds. Exactly 3600 seconds. Not that big right? When I put it that way. Easily you will scroll through 200 YouTube shorts and learning nothing, feeling exhausted, tired and drained. So how are we going to beat the system? Is there an easy way, without using a hard motivation draining dopamine detox?
Fortunately, there is. To understand you need to know how YouTube works. It monitors data. By various means. By your likes, comments, watch history, search history etc. And once they have enough data about you, they will label you as type BBV. Next part easy. YouTube will bombard you with what other type BBV humans are watching. As this perfectly matches your character, you will get hooked. And it is really hard to break that addiction.
Beat YouTube addiction Method 1
Now think about what will happen if you convince YouTube you are a Type AAA person. Who is learning, trying to educate yourself through YouTube. One way to do it is to deliberately use YouTube to search what you like to learn. Documentaries, instead of random clips. Motivational videos instead of movie clips.
Over time YouTube will figure out that you are looking for something and provide you with more and more good stuff, that you are unable to reach even with search queries. So good that you will be hooked to get motivated!
Next easy step is to subscribe to good channels. Ones which give a meaning to your life. And lose other non-motivational entertainment kinds. Low value stuff. Overtime YouTube will again provide you with good stuff.
Beat YouTube addiction Method2 - A mini-University?
Let's say you fail to do that. That you are too lazy to figure out what is good and do a search on good stuff. But if you are mindful, you will see occasionally YouTube provides a motivational video, good documentaries etc. randomly in your feed. What you can do, if you don't have time to watch these is to save to watch later. I am sure there comes a time during the day or the week, that you are inherently motivated to see the good stuff. But how likely you are going to find good stuff easily without any distraction unless you have bunch of stuff saved in your to be watched list. You know they are good as you have screened them. More importantly like in the previous scenario, things once saved will make the algorithm alert for similar content and suddenly the YouTube can become a mini university where just hanging out will improve your knowledge.
So, those are my suggestions. I would like to know about yours.
I try to avoid political posts on social media because they usually amount to two sides slinging their talking points at each other, to drum up outrage.
Unfortunately friends or quality content providers sometimes get caught up in political posts, and while it’s tempting to read a friends post/repost, the result is inevitably political posts infiltrating my algorithm. So I frequently enlist the snooze or mute buttons to combat that unintended consequence.