Visualizing My YouTube Addiction
Analyzing 18 months of my YouTube usage data, and how doing so helped me overcome a long-standing habit.

YouTube: My Guilty Pleasure
Many people regularly use at least one technology that provides an immediate pleasure response. For many, it is Social Media. Some check their email incessantly, and others scour Reddit many times a day.
My vice has long been YouTube. I’m a passive watcher rather than an active one. I would open the app, watch whatever YouTube recommended to me, and often heed its recommendation of what I should watch next. I enjoyed forfeiting control to YouTube’s recommendation algorithms, and I became a passenger on a ship commanded by someone else.
I’ve always strived to eliminate all usage of technologies that are specifically designed to be addictive. I’ve tried in the past to curtail my habit of watching YouTube videos without much success. In the Spring of 2020, however, several circumstances coincided to shock me into quitting YouTube forever.
The COVID-19 pandemic sent many of us to work from home, disrupting our daily routines and habits. I became increasingly conscious of how I was spending my time, and I wanted to replace activities no longer possible with healthy, fulfilling alternatives. On daily walks around the neighborhood, I discovered and quickly devoured the podcast Rabbit Hole by the New York Times, which explores the dark side of how YouTube can impact our personal health and the health of our society.
I knew that I was using YouTube on a daily basis, but beyond that, I didn’t have a deep understanding of how I was using the platform. As such, I downloaded my YouTube watch history data in late April 2020 to learn more about my YouTube watching patterns.
In this post, I’ll share the patterns I saw in my YouTube usage data that led me to quit YouTube forever. I’ll also share what I found to be useful to break a years-long habit that I’ve repeatedly failed to break in the past.
Understanding My YouTube Usage
I quickly noticed that I increased the rate at which I was watching videos in early March – which is when I started working from home. Working and sheltering at home freed up time usually spent doing things that are no longer possible, like commuting or attending social gatherings, and I was using some of this freed time to watch YouTube videos.

In addition to the number of videos I watched, I was interested in when I watched them. On weekdays before the pandemic arrived, I would typically watch videos as soon as I woke up and right before going to bed, with almost no usage in between during working hours. On weekends, my watches were more uniformly spread throughout the day, as I had fewer obligations, though I would still watch most frequently in the mornings and at night before bed.

This trend in itself is concerning, as many forms of media can negatively impact restfulness when consumed during the early and late hours of the day.
When looking at the timing of my watches on the weekdays of March and April 2020, however, it became clear that I was starting to develop more problematic tendencies. In March, an increase in usage between 12 pm and 2 pm shows that I started using YouTube during my lunch break. This on its own doesn’t imply that my productivity at work was affected by my changing YouTube usage – as this time was usually spent eating and socializing with coworkers – but it was a warning sign that the separation between work and leisure that I enforced when working in an office was starting to falter.
This trend exacerbated in the month of April. My usage in the morning stretched later into the day than before, as I was using time usually spent commuting to watch YouTube videos. My usage also became more uniform throughout the day instead of limited to the hours before and after work, showing that I would occasionally watch YouTube videos during working hours. I found this trend to be unacceptable, as I pride myself on being dedicated and focused while working and using my leisure time well.

Finally, I wanted to understand more about what led to the overall increase in my YouTube usage. There are two main behaviors that can lead to an increase in overall watch time: launching YouTube more frequently throughout the day, and watching more videos per app launch.
To see which of these behaviors I was engaging in, I split my watches into "sessions" – which I defined as consecutive watches that are not separated by 30 minutes or more of inactivity. I then looked at changes in the number of watches per session to see if I was diving deeper into the YouTube "rabbit hole" each time I opened the platform, and the number of sessions per day to see if I was simply launching YouTube more frequently.
The distribution in the number of watches per session became less skewed over time, suggesting that binge-watching many videos at once constituted a smaller portion of my overall watches in April 2020 than in pre-pandemic times.

It’s clear from looking at the average number of daily sessions started over time that my increased YouTube usage in March and April was driven by an increase in the number of times I opened YouTube throughout the day. The average number of sessions ranged from 2–2.5 per day in pre-pandemic times, and increased by almost 100% to around 4 per day in March and April.

Of the two ways to increase overall usage – increasing the number of sessions and increasing the number of watches per session – I find the former to be a bigger hindrance to productivity because of how difficult it is to refocus once one is distracted from a task. Studies show that it takes over 20 minutes to refocus on a task after being distracted. This means that getting briefly distracted by YouTube videos intermittently throughout the day could have a larger impact on productivity than infrequent, longer duration use. If we use the statistic quoted above, watching only 25 minutes of YouTube in five separate sessions could have the same impact on focused work time as watching a full 100-minute movie in one sitting and being productive for the rest of the day.
How I Quit YouTube
I was so concerned by the findings I shared above that I pledged to eliminate my YouTube usage altogether. Instead of watching 50–100 videos per week in my peak usage, I reduced my usage to 2–5 videos per week.

Here are some takeaways on what I found useful when working on my YouTube habit:
1. Understand your habit deeply
Before I could change my YouTube habit, I had to first understand the patterns in my behavior, and how my habit was affecting my life. As a Data Scientist, I found that the most effective (and fun!) way to do this was to download and analyze my usage history, as I’ve shared above. I find that scrutinizing data about myself can be enlightening, and that data about my behavior is often more readily available than I originally thought (most tech companies allow you to download your usage data – some companies require more persistence than others).
There are many other ways you can learn more about your habit. Some people enjoy journaling, for example. What was important was to understand when I was falling into my YouTube habit, and what triggered me to do so. This helped me state concretely the costs associated with my habit, which gave me the motivation I needed to change it.
2. Define unambiguous rules for what’s allowed and what’s not
In the past, I’ve set nebulous goals such as "reduce my YouTube usage." As it’s not clear if these goals are met or not, I found it difficult to hold myself accountable for reaching them.
The goal to "eliminate all YouTube usage" is unambiguous, and so I wasn’t tempted to let the habit of watching videos creep back into my routine.
I also found it useful to introduce mechanisms to hold myself accountable to the rule I set. As soon as I resolved to stop watching YouTube videos, I uninstalled the YouTube app from my phone, so that I would have to re-download it to watch a video, which I’m less likely to do mindlessly.
3. Find realistic alternatives
When I decided to stop using YouTube, I envisioned myself using the time that I would otherwise use on the platform engaging in productive and enriching activities, like reading or learning a new language. After I stopped watching YouTube videos, however, I found that this wasn’t realistic, as I didn’t always have the mental capacity to do these more enriching activities.
Instead, I found an alternative habit to replace the old one that I felt better about. Just as a smoker may replace cigarettes with chewing gum, I replaced watching YouTube with playing chess on my phone. I find chess to require the right amount of concentration so that I can still play when I’m tired, and that I feel like I’m building a skill that I’d like to improve upon.