Thought I could leave social media and keep youtube
Short answer: No. Not in the same way I was using it anyway.
After stopping IG cold for about 6 months now, and Facebook since January, I now have distance so I can see what I was doing and how it was affecting me.
Buffering using the infinite scroll
Aside from the well known affects of dopamine hits from social media, I was most definitely using social media, specifically IG, to buffer and distract me from feeling any kind of uncomfortable feelings and/or anxiety. I would spend WAY to much time on the never ending scroll. Now this is something I have done in other ways - watching too much tv, binging Netflix, other longer videos. But this never ending scroll of short form video is where the danger zone is. There is documented research out there about the damaging effects of this. I am not going to site sources, but if you want to look there is plenty out there. But yeah, that short form scroll got me good.
Anxiety with physical symptoms
So I have been one of those people that doesn't like to pay too close attention to news, but I like to be informed if there is something that might impact me directly. For my sanity's sake. In my habit of infinite scrolling, inevitably at some point curiosity and the algorithm takes over. Next thing I know I am having to tell myself to put the phone down at 2AM so I can sleep, waking up the next day with physical anxiety symptoms. My heart was racing. My chest was tight. And I felt ANXIOUS. That's when I knew that this habit had to stop.
YouTube is not "Social Media", so it should be okay, right?
That's what I thought. Long form videos, with some shorts here and there. Should be fine, right? But there's this slippery slope of "habit." The habit of scrolling, still in place. Even though the platform looks different, those tricky short form videos with the infinite scroll, are right there to be my new supplier.
It took me a little while to come to terms with the fact that I was just doing the same thing somewhere else. But I didn't want to give up YouTube. There is a lot of content that I genuinely enjoy on YouTube. However, side note, this is another place that is a minefield of AI that becomes more difficult to maneuver through every day.
So I made the conscious decision to actively not consume the shorts in the same way I have been. So basically I made an active limit to one or two a day. And when those one or two started to turn into one or two... two or three times a day, I decided that I need to actively hide the shorts every time I open YouTube.
YouTube long form videos, just avoid shorts, should be fine right?
Yeah, no. I do know that I have an addictive type personality, so this habit just changed again, from the shorts infinite scroll to the home page of Recommended videos. And I didn't even know that I had just transferred this habit, until one day there was some glitching with the home page that resulted in reaching THE END of the recommended videos. It can go on forever usually. When I reached THE END, I just kept refreshing to see more and different recommended videos.
I then moved on to just binge watching long form videos. And I realized I had a capital R REAL problem.
Where am I with it now?
I still use YT, but I have to go in there very intentionally. These days, I do my best to go in there only if I am looking for something specific. If I am not looking for something specific, then sometimes I don't open it. But if I am feeling regulated, and I go in and see one thing that I really want to watch, I will watch, then make sure I close the app/window afterwards. Then do something else. It's a day by day thing though.
And my algorithm knows me, so I have been tempted, and already fallen into a couple traps. I treat the whole thing as though I am my own experiment and I take note of these things. If it feels relaxed and not all consuming, then I continue. If not, then we do something different. I just want to move to consuming media in a mindful way, instead of it consuming me.
End Transmission.