My YouTube Addiction

Now, YouTube has been my drug

Since the first day I watched videos on YouTube, I realized I would never be bored with this website. It turns out I was right. So many interesting, entertaining, and educational quality videos over there on YouTube opened my eyes, and opened a window that I could see the wonderful world through it, made my life much easier and more interesting than ever before. But, everything has two sides, the bad side of YouTube is I can easily spend too much time on it, and finally lost focus on other important must-do things, gradually, I lost in the video jungles. The YouTube addiction came to alive.

YouTube is big, I got educated and fucked

There are so many types of quality videos on different channels on YouTube. I can find open courses, television programs and all sorts of videos uploaded by people all around the globe, and I can watch them all for free.

In our lives, we have so many unknown fields we didn’t reach before, but the most talented people in those fields made videos and uploaded on YouTube, we can educate ourselves by watching the videos. If I want to find knowledge about quantum physics, I used to google it, but now I will do YouTube it first. The videos tell you more details and vividly describe the concepts, it’s time-saving and easier to understand.

I googled it, there are more than 5 billion videos on YouTube by now, and the number is growing bigger and faster every day. 5 billion? unbelievable. It is not just the number of videos, but most of them are high definition, 720P to 4K. It’s insane, people can upload 4K videos and can be streamed online. I mean, the devices of 4K resolution are even not common in everyday life by now.

But anything good will become a time-wasting bad thing if you do it too much and miss out the point.

Because of the number and quality of the videos, wander all the corners of YouTube has become my habit. I can easily be dragged into the river of the digital ocean, every day I feel I was information overloaded. I can watch the videos all day without moving my legs. Sometimes I don’t know what am I watching for, the mind seems goes into a lazy zone, the attempt to watch videos takes over my body. After watching lots of videos, I got tired, I blame myself why did I waste so much time to watch all of those junks.

I know that sit all day before the computer screen is not good for physical and mental health.

How to defeat the addiction

The YouTube addiction is strong at the bottom of my heart. I know maybe I will never get rid of it. But I am trying to defeat it. Below are some strategies I use to not let the evil spirit of addiction take over me.

Strategy one: Blogging

I found blogging is a good way to avoid watching videos. To write a post, I need to concentrate intensely on the topic I am writing on, the deep thinking takes over almost the room of my mind, so I don’t have much other attention to think other things. When I was blogging, I get into a spiritual world, where I feel the power of deep thinking, it frees me in the real world and lets me into the paradise of freedom. The inspired spirits run and flow through my head, I can feel I am myself, this feeling is maybe the result of the source of real self.

Blogging has another advantage over watching junk videos-blogging makes me think more clearly and positively. Write a post is not an easy thing, I need clean up my mind first, try to use the proper word to explain what am I going to say. Sometimes, it takes much time to write down a paragraph, and sometimes I don’t need to think harshly, the ideas just jump out of my head, I could see a picture in front of me, the scenes in that picture are alive and I can get into the picture, to join the people and communicate. The brain activities through all the thinking let me get into the pure soul of myself. I know who am I want to be. The writing process strengthens my mind to overcome the bad habits easily because I know the power of real thinking is much more powerful than any other evil spirits which try to invade my mind.

Strategy two: Do some reading

Reading is a way to reset one’s mind. When I have done something intensely, reading can help me back to be peaceful and enjoy the life. Thus, I can turn my focus from boring state to the enjoyable spiritual state, to avoid watching videos. Someone said, there are gold and beauty in the books.

Strategy three: Get out and exercise

Sit in the office all day is enough for a person to take if I also spend my own spare time to watch videos, that would be boring to death and harm my health at the same time. I need to refresh my mind and to maintain my health.

Once I get out of the roof, the natural view and fresh air give me the power to defend my physical and spiritual body. When I ride a bike with fast speed in Bay Area, the fresh cool ocean wind come to my body, I feel I am free. This feeling is precious for people like me live in a big city. The biking exercise helps me to release the staple energy, I can feel it.

Conclusion

Human beings are lazy by nature. When we are lazy, we just do things that are easy and interesting, watch YouTube videos is one of them. Once we spent to much time on useless kinds of stuff, the self-blame state established. To control my mental state, I need blogging, read, and exercise to cancel out the bad feeling I created. Through these strategies, I learned there are more meaningful and interesting and greater things waiting for me to do, I should prepare for a better me by dropping watching meaningless videos.

The YouTube addiction need to be killed if I am going to become someone I always want to be. I am in a situation just the frog in the warm water, someday I will be dead in nowhere if I don’t change my mindset. Fortunately, I found strategies to against the addiction monster. I hope I can come up with a better method to establish a motivational state to push myself toward success.