Get thee behind me, IG Reels

A frank report of the ongoing struggle to take back my brain from short form video content

YouTube shorts are ruining my life.

To be clear, my brain has always been broken. When I was six, I spent two full days taking tests administered by a kind woman in a comfortable office with a poodle who drank enthusiastically from the toilet. Every time I finished a test, she’d give me a handful of Mike & Ike’s. I have never been more motivated. This is still, more or less, how I work.

The nice woman and her incurably thirsty poodle diagnosed me with ADHD, specifically the “inattentive type.” I’ve spent the intervening 18 years trying to hogwrassel my brain into submission. Somehow, I made it through high school, college, and (so far) 18 months of full-time employment without any sort of prescription for this condition. To date, the strongest stimulant I’ve yet experienced is my grandmother’s extra-strength coffee.

Which brings me to a month ago; YouTube shorts are ruining my life.

We, collectively, have known for a while that smartphones are designed to be addictive. Addictive in a literal sense, addictive in the full “drugs and alcohol” sense of the word. But my phone does also provide a legitimate and tangible value in my life — anyone who would pretend otherwise is lying. It’s like a pack of cigarettes I can call my mom with.

I routinely found myself locked in a cycle I would barely notice I’d entered, opening Instagram or YouTube or (on again and off again) TikTok with an intention — say, looking for a recipe or trying to remember the name of a kid I went to middle school with — and being greeted instead by a six to sixty-second video perfectly selected to reduce my mental function to that of an iPad-clutching three-year-old being pushed through Old Navy in a stroller.

Best-case scenario, I’d forget what I was there for and jump ship immediately. More often I would wakeup an indeterminate amount of time later, annoyed at people I would never meet and dealing with a headache. This would happen three to seven times a day.

I spent a lot of time sitting with books, but hardly got any reading done. I got basically no writing done. I was tired most of the time. Something had to change.

As I understand it, these apps traffic in whatever reward chemicals my ADHD brain is unable to regulate. Trying to focus on anything not 5”x3” and screaming is like trying to motivate a dog with a treat when there’s a limitless pile of ground beef and tennis balls on the other side of the room. Or something.

So I’ve been doing things a little differently for the past month, and I have to say I’ve been noticing some stark, real time differences in my mental state. I’ve read five books so far in January. I’m writing every day again. I’m still tired, but my brain doesn’t shut off as soon as I get a little sleepy.

Now, this is by no means a “how to,” because:

a) I’m still in the middle of this. In no way am I out of the woods. My brain hasn’t healed so much as I’ve staunched the arterial bleeding of my attention span — but hey, that’s something!

b) I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m 24 years old and I can barely manage simple arithmetic. My understanding of my brain basically begins and ends with the understanding that it sits somewhere between my ears.

But nonetheless this is working for me lately, so I figured I’d share. These are the changes I’ve made.

1. I terminated my Twitter account (a while ago now, sorry Elon), deactivated my personal Instagram, took the YouTube app off my phone, and deleted my TikTok app. Now if I want ~content~, I need to seek it out.

2. I grabbed my old clock radio from my room in my parents’ house over the holidays and I started sleeping with my phone charging wayyyy on the other side of the room. Now when I “log off” for the night, I’m meaningfully putting it out of sight and mind.

3. I read basically until the very moment I zonk.

4. I wake up early and read some more. I’m someone who likes to stay in bed a while before getting up, and I’m lucky in that I don’t really have to get out of bed for work until around 7:45, so I usually wake up around 6:30-7 and get an hour of reading in. Sometimes I brew coffee in the middle, sometimes after. Often I move to the couch halfway through. I always feed the cat sometime in here (he makes sure of that).

5. I’m trying to get better at leaving my phone in another room, or in the car, or just generally “away” more. I have no idea why I feel so tethered to this tiny doom box, but I do. This, for me, is the next frontier.

Steps 2 and 4 have been the biggest game changers in my day-to-day state of mind. I think you could probably do anything with your mornings and have a similar effect, as long as its something that’s unplugged and requires some effort on your part. I can feel a huge difference in my brain’s functionality when I start my day with my own thoughts rather than bombarding it with flashing lights and colors and more information than a caveman got in his whole life. I’m also getting a lot more reading done, which is always nice.

Trying to find a happy median in your relationship with technology without becoming an insufferable luddite is hard. I don’t foresee it getting easier any time soon, and I don’t have the strength in my convictions to get a flip phone (yet). But this is helping; I haven’t watched a YouTube short in nigh on a month. For now, that’s enough.