Youtube Addiction & Growing Pains
I decided to do a week-long social media cleanse to counteract some intense, anxiety and depression I’ve been facing lately. I’ve noticed that every single time I lay in bed, I just want to watch a Youtube video. I want to just put aside whatever good or bad that happened during the day and just have a moment of rest and relaxation. But it always turns into hours and hours of unsatisfactory fulfillment of needing to find the next thing to watch. I start getting bored with my options, but yet, I can’t get off the platform. Every lull in my day that’s not filled with something stimulating. I automatically turn into my phone and click where Youtube used to be.
I will say, I’ve really healed my relationship with the more addictive apps like Instagram and Snapchat. I used to get so caught up in the infinite scrolls of these apps and the constant attention and validation Snapchat would bring me, but once I slowly weaned off of all social media that I found addictive, I found my next biggest issue. YouTube sucked me right in and ate me up. This is now where I spend too many hours per day, feeling unable to do anything about it. I begin to attempt to go to sleep by looking through the shorts on YouTube that I swore I would never touch out of fear of getting addicted to something like TikTok. Slowly but surely, I began watching one or two a day, which has turned into one or two hundred per day.
See, these algorithm engineers have cracked the code on how to slowly change your behavior without you noticing, and I didn’t notice it while it was happening, but I now notice since it’s gotten bad. Now I sit here feeling so uneasy that I can’t relax and numb my brain and just watch a chill YouTube video. A small panic sets in when I try to click where Youtube used to be and it’s not there and I realize that I’m not gonna cheat on myself so I have to find something else to do.
My next best option is picking up one of my books that I really love to read, or in this case writing this reflective blog post. This simple rerouting from a memorized habit to a less stimulating one sucks in the moment, but feels so much better once I do it. Instead of scrolling through reels before bed I read a good chunk of my spiritual book and feel like I gain a lot of insight and wisdom. Instead of watching people living life I wanna live, I can actually get up and go outside and go on that hike because I’m feeling bored. This is the essence of the benefit that NoSo serves: replacing this bad habit with easy to turn to, better ones. Now, three days later, this decision to temporarily abstain from Youtube has so quickly lifted me out of this funk, and I feel so grateful that I have the tools that I’ve created to escape this issue. It always sucks so much at the beginning, but the sucky feelings are only shedding light on how deep the addiction has actually gotten and how bad it feels to not have access to it for a short period of time.
The best part is after a few days when you get used to it and he stars to fall in love with habits that you’re turning to instead. You start to realize what life really has in store for you and how creative you really can be with just a little bit of free time.
So my call to action is this: take a week from social media and see how it feels. Document it and really feel the emotions behind it. And if you feel hesitant to try this look into the deeper reasons why. What are you avoiding?
