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.
Ask HN: How do you fight YouTube addiction and procrastination? I'm struggling
51–60 of 153 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you fight YouTube addiction and procrastination? I'm struggling
#52Re: Ask HN: How do you fight YouTube addiction and procrastination? I'm struggling
#53First 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.
Re: Ask HN: How do you fight YouTube addiction and procrastination? I'm struggling
#54I'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 be…
I love this, I block sites during certain times to stop me wasting time but I might add this too.
Re: Ask HN: How do you fight YouTube addiction and procrastination? I'm struggling
#55Go 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.
Re: Ask HN: How do you fight YouTube addiction and procrastination? I'm struggling
#56It 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?
Re: Ask HN: How do you fight YouTube addiction and procrastination? I'm struggling
#57If 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 :)^^
Re: Ask HN: How do you fight YouTube addiction and procrastination? I'm struggling
#58I 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.
Re: Ask HN: How do you fight YouTube addiction and procrastination? I'm struggling
#59It'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.
Re: Ask HN: How do you fight YouTube addiction and procrastination? I'm struggling
#60I 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...