Procrastinate Your Vice Away
Sometimes, it's easy to get trapped in a YouTube binge. Or maybe you get trapped in a medium or news article binge. Or perhaps you're the impulse buyer type who can't resist shopping and buying stuff. What do you do if you want to break free?
Instead of trying to stop using willpower, you need to learn how to trick your brain. Your brain is really smart, it's been tricking you this whole time trying to get you to do stuff you know you'll ultimately regret. So you need to trick your brain in return. How do you do that? With the power of procrastination.
Procrastinate on those YouTube videos, just bookmark that video and promise yourself you'll watch it later. And keep doing that, watch your to-watch list grow bigger and bigger. In a few weeks, you'll look back at all those YouTube videos you were supposed to watch but didn't and wonder why you wanted to watch so much videos in the first place. So you delete them.
Now, do the same for all your other addictions and uncontrollable consumptions. Just save it and promise yourself you'll do it later. Because I know how bad we are at keeping such promises, which is why this tactic will definitely work for a lot of us.