5 really chill YouTube channels that help me calm the heck down

Oops, I haven’t done a blog post that wasn’t about books in 6 months. This blog wasn’t supposed to be a book blog (although the October reading update is coming) so uhhhhhh… here’s a post about something else I like to do, which is hide from my problems by watching YouTube.

Recently, like many people, I have been a teensy weensy bit stressed. So sometimes it is nice to just make a cup of herbal tea and settle in to a cosy video. Here are some channels I have been liking a lot recently. Some are vlogs, others are more focused on hobbies of which I have little-to-no experience, but they all generally deliver the cosy vibes that I really crave at the moment. Also most of them involve cute pets, which is a benefit to any parasocial relationship.

If I were a lifestyle vlogger in lockdown

Hi guys, welcome back to my channel!

It’s a bank holiday Monday so I thought I’d do a low-key, day-in-my-life vlog, with maybe a get-ready-with-me and what-I-eat-in-a-day. Later I might even trying-on-everything-I-own and closet-clearout.

It’s really important to have a morning routine, and you all know I’ve been reading The Power of Habit, so I have been trying to cultivate little rituals to start my day right. Currently I like to lie in bed for several hours staring at my phone and contemplating my own mortality. I’m trying not to focus on the news too much, so instead I spent a while reading gossip about fashion bloggers I used to follow back in 2009. It makes me feel very centred and present.

What’s cheering me up right now

Oh yeah, I have a blog. As you might have guessed from my drop in posting, the last few months have not been so great. A lot of shitty things have been going on and unfortunately that currently shows no signs of stopping.

But I don’t really want to write about any of that right now, and one of the reasons I started this blog was to have a space to just geek out about stuff I’m enjoying, so let’s talk about some of that instead.

Attempting an internet detox for my brain

August has not been my best month ever. It definitely wasn’t the worst either, but I had a lot of days where I honestly felt pretty crappy. The land of low moods, anxiety, stress and self-doubt.

When I feel like this, I notice myself slipping into some unhealthy internet patterns. Things like:

• checking the news over and over
• scrolling through Twitter for ages
• binge-watching YouTube for hours at a time

These habits are part cause and part effect. I definitely don’t think they’re entirely to blame for my rubbish moods, but the first two can spark or exacerbate them. While YouTube doesn’t tend to make me feel more negative, it often distracts me from doing something that would actually help me out. And when I’m feeling down, it’s a lot harder to exercise discipline around using them.

I want to try to break free of this cycle, so for September I’m going to attempt a sort of internet detox. I am not doing this to boost productivity or anything like that (you know my thoughts on this). But I am hoping it’ll help with my general wellbeing.

Thoughts on 6 months of blogging

I’ve been writing this blog for more than half a year now. This will be the 29th post I publish.

Starting a blog in 2019 feels a bit like signing up for MySpace or posting on Usenet or some other dinosaurish internet activity. Really, I should have started a YouTube channel or tried to make it big on TikTok. Nowadays, if you want to spend hours and hours editing yourself into audience-friendly content, video seems to be the way to do it.

But, anachronistic as it may be, I’m happy I started this blog. It’s been a positive thing in my life and I’m excited to keep at it.

A tour of my YouTube subscriptions

A few weeks ago I was talking to some friends about how much time we all spend watching YouTube. “I’d hate to know how much time I waste on it,” I said. “I bet it’s awful.” Then someone told me that you can actually check this in the app. I immediately declared that I was never, ever going to check because sometimes ignorance is bliss.

Today, I gave in and looked. On average, I spend more than an hour a day watching YouTube. This was kind of sobering. An hour is a good chunk of my time, especially my leisure time. It’s more than I spend doing any other hobbies, like cooking, reading, playing games, watching films, or exercising.

So, what exactly am I watching?