Ask HN: How do you fight YouTube addiction and procrastination? I'm struggling

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.

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.

> 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?

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.