How to overcome YouTube Addiction

You don't have to be addicted to YouTube.

#115 · January 25, 2026 · 7 min read

· Moalboal, The Philippines

It's remarkable how little time I spend on YouTube nowadays, considering that there used to be a time when:

...I woke up in the morning... (so far so good)
...reached for my phone... (first mistake)
...to open up the YouTube app... (second mistake)
...and let myself get dragged into a stupor of algorithmic self-indulgence... (thirst mistake)
...while allowing this to be the first thirty minutes of my day... (fourth mistake)
...and doing this every morning for the rest of the week (can you imagine?)

Suffice to say that I felt like a complete loser for letting myself lose this much control so easily. During the time when this was my default state, I had no defence mechanism against this compulsive behaviour. Heck, I didn't even consider it a problem. It took me months before I slowly found strategies on how to overcome my YouTube addiction.

Here's how I got off the drug and how today, I can enjoy YouTube again.

Away with the app!

The logical thing to do would be to set App Limits to have more control over one's own consumption, but let's be honest–iOS makes it too easy for you to just ignore these limits. Since that didn't work, I had to come up with more drastic measures: deleting the damn app. That alone had me consume so much less altogether.

The app, of course, is designed to maximise the time you spend watching videos. I uninstalled it and restricted myself to only ever watching YouTube on my laptop.

Today, I stick to a life without YouTube app and I haven't looked back.

Avoid the feed

The feed is a malicious human invention. A vortex to get dragged into so easily, no matter how high your self-control. It knows everything about its victims–their likes, their dislikes, their passions, their guilty pleasures, just exactly what makes them tick. Don't fuck with the algo–it's a losing battle. The remedy is simple: just avoid the damn feed. But how?

Never (I repeat): Never go to the YouTube homepage. Usually, when visiting YouTube, you have a purpose. Experience has shown that "I am bored" is not a good purpose. A better purpose would be looking up a topic you are interested in or checking up on a particular channel you have subscribed to.

I often use YouTube in preparation for a trip. Say I wanted to visit Cebu (Hello Filipino readers by the way, I know you're out there), I'd often check travel vloggers I'm already subscribed to in order to find out if they had already been there. If not, I'd just search for "Cebu" or "Cebu vlog". Now, how do you search YouTube without going to the homepage? One strategy would be to blindfold yourself so you can't see all the tasty treats your feed has come up with. But there's another way.

I found DuckDuckGo's bangs to be my answer of avoiding the homepage. It's an ingenious feature that lets you search YouTube by typing the corresponding bang followed by the specific search term into your browser's address bar:

!yt cebu vlog

This command asks DuckDuckGo to ask YouTube to search for me. After I hit return, I get directly taken to the search results page. In Firefox, you can switch between search engines next to the address bar. That way, bangs works even if DuckDuckGo is not your default search engine.

Thanks so much, duck!

Disable Auto-Play

Auto-Play is yet another malicious human invention intended to make its users lose control. No matter if it's Netflix, Disney+ or YouTube, if you're an addict, Auto-Play has no right to be active.

The recommendation trap

I was quite happy with myself having made it this far. However, I still occasionally fell victim to senseless consumption of video content. Mind you, it was content I really enjoyed but never intended to watch in the first place. The algo got me again. How, you ask? By displaying recommendations next to videos I had purposefully watched. Now, how to get rid of those?

Simple! There's a browser add-on called Unhook which removes them for you. And it doesn't stop there: it also removes video recommendations on the home page and offers to disable comments and Shorts.

That only leaves recommendations that pop-up directly inside the YouTube player once you have finished watching a video (somehow Unhook doesn't remove them for me). To avoid these, just be careful to stop a video before it reaches the very end.

Web over app

I've only did the following once I've been living with the above tips for over half a year: I've noticed that there will come the time when watching on your phone will be more convenient. And that's fine, if you just stick to YouTube in the browser.

The website is a lot more cumbersome to use and doesn't run as smoothly as the app, making the whole user experience a lot less enjoyable, which of course is a good thing in this case. There's no automatic switch to landscape mode, if you have orientation-lock enabled, there's no support for chapters, you can't skip ads if you're using Premium, double tap left or right to scrub doesn't work, and so on.