When I first discovered BookTube 9 years ago, I became very obsessed with it. I would watch it all day long and add every book to my never ending wishlist. It was fun to see so many different types of people with all different tastes share what books they’re currently reading. On that note though, I really loved watching the channels where they focused a lot more on older books and not trying to only showcase new releases. One of my favorite channels was Louise from TheBigHairedBookworm.

She has since stopped releasing newer videos but I rediscovered her channel again before Christmas while I was purging the channels I’m subscribed to. Now I’ve made it a small project to slowly watch all her videos from the oldest to the newest and list down all the books she mentions in her videos. I want to be more engaged with the videos I’m watching because I feel like it’s such a waste of time and mental energy to me to just passively let Youtube videos play in the background. I want to retain the information I’m watching so what better thing to do than to take notes.

I also want to just be more mindful of my media consumption because it’s so easy to waste a couple of hours every day just getting sucked into the never-ending Youtube algorithm showing me more and more videos I could watch. One after the other, more and more. It literally makes me feel like crap when I end up in one of those spirals. I would like to slowly train myself not to crave Youtube videos but to want to read a book instead or write in my journal or meditate or go for a workout. It’s such a struggle. I’m so used to just sitting down and scrolling non-stop on my phone to entertain myself because it’s so low effort. I don’t mind doing it occasionally like when I’m hanging out with my partner but other than that I’d like to give my brain a break.

I’ll give updates on how this little experiment is going as time goes by. The first smallest step I’ve done is to keep my phone charging away from my bed and used a small digital alarm clock to wake me up in the morning instead. I’ve set my phone to Sleep mode too and I have it on Silent so I don’t get woken up by any message notification that might come through in the nighttime. I also decided to bring my Kobo e-reader with me to bed and use that to entertain myself to sleep and to entertain myself when I first wake up instead of my phone and social media. Its onty been day 1 so I’ll see how it goes at the end of the week. We’ll see if it sticks.