The Battle Against Short Video Addiction: They Are Determined to Save Their Brains#
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This article comes from the WeChat public account: Phoenix Network (ID: ifeng-news), author: Chen Mo, editor: Zhou Zhezhe, AI graphics: Gao Ziran, cover image from: Visual China.
The article discusses the negative impacts of increasing addiction to short videos, including memory decline and attention distraction, and shares experiences of some individuals trying to quit their short video addiction.
• 💡 Addiction to short videos can lead to memory decline and attention distraction.
• 💡 The fragmentation and rapid stimulation of short videos make them easy to become addictive.
• 💡 Some people are quitting short video addiction through reading, exercising, and deep viewing of films.
One day, while lying on the sofa scrolling through short videos, a Beijing resident named Yuan Shuo noticed a layer of fat forming on his belly.
At first, he thought it was just a lack of exercise from spending hours on his phone every day. But he quickly realized it was due to his addiction to short videos, which was bringing comprehensive negative effects to his life—“People become dumber, fatter, and lose attention and creativity.”
Yuan Shuo, 35, is also widely known as the science popularization writer "He Senbao." At the end of 2023, he spoke out on Weibo, believing that his addiction to short videos led to a decrease in his "brain memory," along with a weakening of his "will to maintain a healthy life."
He described the feeling of brain fog to Phoenix Network: forgetting familiar nouns and concepts, not remembering old friends' names, and often forgetting where he parked his car, having to "search several levels in the parking lot for a long time."
“I can say that my brain was first ruined by short videos, and then my body and health, attention, and creativity were all significantly impaired,” he wrote. This Weibo post received over 20,000 likes.
Not only He Senbao, but an increasing number of people addicted to short videos have noticed symptoms of memory decline and attention distraction: unable to focus on reading; unable to remember a 6-digit verification code; only having the patience to finish a movie in 3 minutes; after putting down their phones, their brains feel exhausted and blank… “I feel like I've become illiterate,” said Yang Xiaoke, a junior liberal arts student.
Now, they are determined to fight against short video addiction and reclaim their long-lost attention.
Addiction: An Endless Stream
An Ping, a member of the post-70s generation and a graduate of Peking University's philosophy department, had spent years consuming substantial philosophical texts during her doctoral studies, with her thesis reaching 100,000 words. For many years, she considered herself an audience for in-depth content and remained wary of short videos that were "entertainment to death" or "nipple fun."
In July 2023, she was still found by the algorithm at her "soft spot."
That day, An Ping accidentally clicked on a cute pet short video—she loves kittens and puppies, and at home, she has a "wiggly butt" corgi. When she encounters kittens and puppies on the road, she also pets and teases them—“The algorithm quickly discovered that I liked cute pets and kept pushing them to me every day.”
Originally, An Ping's life was disciplined and fulfilling: waking up at 5 AM, sleeping around 9 PM, exercising CrossFit for an hour every day, and outside of work, she studied English, read books, and watched movies. But after being hit by the algorithm, cute pet videos occupied all her fragmented time; she always clicked on one after another, hoping to gather all the adorable little animals online, “so charming.”
From a neuroscience perspective, these short videos successfully activated the brain's reward circuits, leading the amygdala, which governs emotions, to start secreting a neurotransmitter known as the "happiness hormone"—dopamine.
“The more dopamine produced by the brain's reward circuit, the easier it is to become addicted to the experience.” Stanford University School of Medicine professor Anna Lembke wrote in her book "Addiction."
23-year-old Chen Ni became addicted to short videos during her freshman year. At that time, during the COVID-19 pandemic, she was taking online classes at home and downloaded a short video app while distracted, which spiraled out of control.
Growing up in a developed area, she became fascinated by grassroots bloggers, especially the lives of rural and town bloggers. This was partly out of curiosity and partly because she was interested in sociology, wanting to see a "more real and comprehensive" China through short videos.
She followed nearly 800 bloggers, and whenever she opened the app, she could see their updates. Among them were self-reliant bloggers who appeared to come from poor backgrounds, always doing various chores in their videos, buying things for their adoptive parents, and taking them to see doctors; there were lazy bloggers who live-streamed in a square until midnight, then slept until noon or afternoon the next day, and then went to eat a bowl of snail noodles; the most captivating for her was a rustic blogger who always dressed in rags, sometimes walking barefoot, mimicking scenes from TV dramas to act out “particularly cheesy little plots,” dragging his whole family in as extras…
“It’s like watching a TV series; the stream never ends,” Chen Ni said.
Through various social media, the stream flows continuously at our fingertips, providing people with an endless supply of “pleasure points.” Whether you are a taxi driver, a delivery guy in an elevator, a college student in class, a Peking University philosophy PhD, a science popularization writer, or a psychological counselor… with just a flick of your finger, you can easily connect to a diverse external world, control the hot and spicy information, and receive the happiness tailored for you by the algorithm.
When immersed in these constantly updating “real-life series,” even attending class cannot stop Chen Ni from watching short videos. Whenever she finds class boring and the teacher just reading from the PPT, she props her phone up on the desk and openly scrolls through. If she forgets her headphones, she watches in silent mode and reviews it again after returning to her dorm. Repeating this, in a campus with widespread Wi-Fi, she can use up to 40GB of mobile data in a month.
Yang Xiaoke, a junior at a 211 university in Beijing, shares a dorm with five people, four of whom are addicted to short videos. The girls even created a short video sharing group to throw in exciting content they come across, sparking lively discussions in minutes.
Pets, food, travel tips, gossip, beauty, and daily life records… Yang Xiaoke spends 2 to 3 hours on short videos every day. Once she stops watching, she feels a sense of panic as if she has been abandoned by the times.
In a sense, short videos have become a refuge in her daily life: “When I don’t know what I want to do, I will open short videos. When a problem arises, my first reaction is not to solve it but to open short videos and escape into them.”
But this happy refuge itself is also a problem.
Attention Fragments Measured in Seconds
Once, psychologist Li Danmin was in the kitchen watching a short video to learn how to make a dish. The recipe had four or five steps, and the video was only over a minute long, but Li Danmin watched it more than ten times before remembering the cooking steps—most of her attention was drawn to the exquisite kitchenware and beautiful plating in the video, “I had no idea what it was talking about.”
Only after watching it for the last time did Li Danmin notice the narrator saying, “Add 108 degrees of boiling water”—clearly, under normal atmospheric conditions, the boiling point of water is 100 degrees.
Li Danmin lamented that she had watched it so many times without realizing this bug: “At that moment, I felt like I had really become a fool.”
He Senbao mainly watches science popularization short videos. This science popularization writer, once known as the "most popular commentator at the National Museum," also found that after watching short videos, he could not fully recount the content of the video. He was puzzled: why could he recount after finishing a book but not after watching a short video?
He recalled a viewpoint: the more effort it takes for a person to acquire information, the more firmly that information is stored in their brain. Conversely, the easier it is to acquire, the less likely it is to be remembered. “Watching short videos involves visuals, which are concrete and easy, with a low threshold, but people may not remember anything. Reading involves words, which are abstract, have a threshold, and require mental effort, so you can recount it afterward.”
A psychologist friend once told He Senbao that if fragmented short videos frequently stimulate the brain to secrete dopamine, over time, the brain will be conditioned by short videos, and attention will be cut into fragments measured in seconds.
Yang Xiaoke once loved art films, but now she says, she “seems unable to sit through any movie.” When she sees those slow long shots and empty shots in art films on her computer, she skips them directly or speeds them up because they are “not stimulating enough.” She has come to enjoy short videos that summarize a movie in 3 minutes, “normal speed is not enough; it has to be at 2x speed.”
Sitting in a cinema, she cannot help but take out her phone midway to check how much longer the movie will last.
“You have adapted to the quick and intense dopamine stimulation of short videos; when such stimulation is expected but does not come, you become restless and bored. For example, when watching short videos, dopamine stimulation might be every 15 seconds, while in a movie, it might be every 90 seconds, and you just can't stand the movie—why is it so slow? I can't keep watching,” He Senbao told Phoenix Network.
Reading is the same. Yang Xiaoke loved reading in high school and could focus on finishing a book in 2 to 3 days, but now she has developed reading difficulties; even after reading, she often has no impression, “the words don’t enter my brain.”
Along with the decline in attention is a decline in memory. Yang Xiaoke recalls that during middle school, she could remember an 11-digit phone number after seeing it once. But now, she needs to see a 6-digit mobile verification code twice before she can enter it. For many things, she has to rely on schedule reminders.
Her liberal arts major requires a lot of memorization, but she is increasingly unable to memorize, which causes her great distress. “Short videos occupy too much of my brain capacity,” she said. In fact, many times she feels bored while scrolling through short videos, but she just can't detach from it and continues to scroll mechanically.
The American science popularization account Better Labs summarizes the addiction state of people like Yang Xiaoke as “social media limbo.” It points out that once a person develops a habit of watching short videos, it becomes difficult to concentrate on complex, in-depth events, and they are always waiting to be stimulated and pleased by the external world. Once their attention returns to themselves, they feel exhausted and bored.
Putting down her phone, Yang Xiaoke feels her brain is blank, “a state of emptiness after being overly stimulated.”
“Addiction,” Withdrawal, and Relapse
After months of being addicted to cute pet short videos, An Ping realized that her reading speed was slowing down. She felt something was wrong and immediately disabled the “video account” feature, cutting off the source of cute pet videos. Looking back now, she can’t remember what she watched at that time.
“My spiritual world is complete and self-consistent. But under such circumstances, short videos can still impact me, which is terrifying,” An Ping said.
After years of working in the psychological counseling industry, Li Danmin discovered for the first time that after downloading a certain short video app, she scrolled through it for two hours straight and immediately uninstalled it, “cutting it off before becoming addicted.” One way she regained her attention was through mindfulness meditation, “whenever I think of it, I will practice mindfulness for a few minutes.”
For An Ping and Li Danmin, after one-click blocking and deleting short videos, the world returned to a calm state; but for many others, this process is as torturous as “detoxing.”
Xiao Jing, a graduate student at the Communication University of China, once researched 25 young people trying to control their short video addiction. Their ages ranged from 18 to 30, mainly university students, with the most addicted spending over 10 hours a day on short videos. Many have experienced uninstalling and reinstalling short video apps multiple times.
They have tried various “withdrawal” methods:
Turning off the “personalized recommendation” feature for short videos or forcing themselves not to scroll through potentially addictive content;
Using time management software to remind themselves of their viewing duration;
Hiding short video apps deep in their phones, placing them in the same folder as apps they never use;
Some even deliberately uninstall short video apps from their phones and install them on tablets to increase the difficulty of addiction—Xiao Jing explained, “Watching short videos on a tablet is not as convenient as on a phone; the interface is vertical, with blank spaces on both sides, making it hard to watch.”
Chen Ni has tried almost all these methods, but none have succeeded.
When watching short videos on a tablet, the blank spaces on the sides have no effect on her, “I mainly focus on the content; as long as the person is in the middle, it’s fine.” Canceling personalized recommendations also doesn’t affect her much. She found that short video apps seem to be upgrading; when she dismisses content she is interested in, the system automatically optimizes and pushes more similar videos to her.
Once the thought of opening a short video arises, it becomes unstoppable. She naturally scrolls to the last page of her phone, searches for the short video app name, and clicks it open, the action so familiar it’s like a conditioned reflex.
“The essence of addiction is that a person, due to a lack of real-world relationships and connections with real people, experiences inner emptiness and loneliness, leading them to turn to stimulating things to maintain a sense of excitement.” Li Danmin believes that the addiction to short videos is fundamentally the same as addiction to drugs.
She once went to a detox center to help addicts with mindfulness training to alleviate their withdrawal pain. The staff told her that detox centers can help drug users quit in one go, but when that person leaves and finds that their surrounding environment hasn’t changed much, they easily fall back into old habits.
She learned of a sad phenomenon: the vast majority of people in detox centers relapse, and the remaining portion is not completely detoxed but rather unreachable.
Once, Yang Xiaoke finally made up her mind to uninstall two commonly used short video apps. Then she experienced withdrawal symptoms—restlessness, feeling that everything else was dull, and inner discomfort.
She browsed through other medium and long video apps, but once a video exceeded 3 minutes, she found it boring and couldn’t continue watching; she still wanted to return to the comfort zone of short videos lasting only a few seconds.
At that time, she had already started an internship, working herself to exhaustion every day. She told herself that life was already tiring, so why be so harsh on herself? What’s wrong with relaxing a bit?
She re-downloaded those two apps and clicked to open them.
The Brain Memory Returns
“To quit short videos, you have to genuinely feel that short videos are useless and meaningless. If there’s even a little bit of fondness, it’s very hard to quit,” said Chen Ni, a former addict.
On a day in July 2023, she suddenly felt that “short videos equal meaninglessness.”
One reason was that she discovered that short video platforms were becoming increasingly commercialized and refined. She found it hard to come across new grassroots bloggers that interested her, and many of the old bloggers she followed no longer updated.
She also inadvertently discovered that the grassroots authenticity that once attracted her was often performed, possibly created by a team, rather than representing real sociological fields.
She came across that rustic rural blogger's secondary account. On the secondary account, he dressed fashionably, cleanly, and with style, forming a stark contrast to his disheveled appearance on the main account, “perhaps he needs the latter image to make money.”
And the girl who took her adoptive parents to see a doctor had switched to the latest iPhone 15 on a certain day in 2023, “with three cameras.” Thus, Chen Ni realized for the first time, “she was just showing us what she wanted us to see.”
More importantly, at that time, she had already graduated from university but had not found a job. She suddenly woke up, realizing how much time she had wasted in the past and that she could no longer indulge like this.
She uninstalled her once-favorite short video app.
“Seeking pleasure and avoiding pain is human instinct, so you have to exert a lot of effort to come out of those things, gradually convincing yourself that they are actually illusions, or like anesthetics and stimulants,” Li Danmin said.
To repair the damage that fragmented short videos have done to his brain, He Senbao's solution was to download a game app called N-Back in December 2023. It is said that engaging in such game training can quickly improve the brain's working memory capacity. In the following two months, he spent half an hour each day on this app.
It was a tough process; every time he felt the ceiling of his mental capacity, He Senbao would sweat profusely and fumble. After repeated practice and repeated failures, he felt a great sense of frustration. Until one day, in an underground parking lot, he finally found his car accurately.
He felt that his brain memory had returned.
After no longer being addicted to cute pet short videos, An Ping began to intentionally find two or three days each week to watch a deep art film lasting over two hours each day. She chose English films and did not look at the subtitles—unlike listening to Chinese, when listening to English, one must concentrate fully to understand what the protagonist is saying.
“Physical exercise is also a good way to concentrate because at that time, you must focus.” An Ping, who persists in CrossFit, said.
Deep reading is also a choice they all coincidentally made. “The brain craves meaning; short videos have very low information density. After watching one after another for a long time, you will find that the brain has not been satisfied. But reading books, which are carriers of high information density, quickly gives the brain a sense of ‘fullness.’ When the craving for meaning is satisfied, you will not rely on short videos anymore.” He Senbao now spends nearly 2 hours reading every day.
Yang Xiaoke also began to deliberately borrow many books from the library, forcing herself to read 2 to 3 in-depth books each week. Gradually, she finished reading the Neapolitan quartet, including "My Brilliant Friend," Shiori Ito's "Black Box: Japan's Shame," Sally Rooney's "Normal People," and Al Babbi's "Social Research Methods," and the joy of reading she experienced in high school slowly returned.
“I can now distinguish what is good and what is not,” she said.
Two Worlds?
An Ping discovered that around short videos, people are becoming polarized. Many of her educated friends prevent their children from being exposed to short videos before they start elementary school; in these families, even the TV is rarely turned on. They encourage their children to read, take them out to play whenever they have time, or watch some enlightening videos together. These parents believe that such children can maintain curiosity about learning and exploring the unknown world after reading.
But she also saw in restaurants that some parents or elders, after sitting down, would take out their phones and hand them to their children to watch short videos. “Once the child takes the phone, they won’t talk during the meal. Their brains, while still developing, have already been implanted with short videos.”
As a psychological counselor, Li Danmin also noticed a worrying phenomenon: some children she sees, when holding phones and iPads, are not playing games but scrolling through short videos—team and single-player games require mental engagement, and team games also require cooperation with others; they find all that too troublesome and prefer to scroll through short videos alone. The loud music of short videos creates an illusion of “at least there are people around.”
“Their brains are trapped in a state that requires quick and intense stimulation, to the point where they can’t even play games.”
Some children severely addicted to short videos, after psychological assessments, are even unable to enter the counseling room.
“They can no longer tolerate the pace of psychological counseling because it requires them to think, to carefully experience and feel; simply put, it requires them to use their brains,” Li Danmin stated.
Yang Xiaoke, still in school, found that this polarization is also happening among her classmates:
Some people never watch short videos or immediately uninstall them after brief exposure. They spend their time reading, exercising, or making podcasts;
Others dedicate a lot of time to short videos, having almost no other interests or hobbies.
She feels that those who watch and those who don’t may become different kinds of people in the future.
But now, short videos have infiltrated contemporary life so thoroughly. Xiao Jing noted that among her research subjects, no one could completely quit short videos. Observing that “some people’s addiction to short videos has reached an outrageous level,” self-media person G Sengdong stated on Weibo on March 3, 2024, “there should be a detox center for short videos in the future.”
Even now, He Senbao and An Ping cannot completely block short videos. Sometimes when they see friends sharing, He Senbao will click to open it. When a friend who exercises together recommends a video on how to do pull-ups to An Ping, she will also watch it. She admits that at such times, videos are more intuitive than text, “but truly valuable content is really rare in the sea of short videos.”
He Senbao recalled a saying he saw online, “As long as a person is not addicted to short videos, they can automatically surpass 50% of people in future work and study”—he thought about it and felt this ratio should be raised to 80%.
Ironically, Chen Ni, who is no longer addicted to short videos, later found a job in short video operations.
The boss requires her to produce short videos that are both high quality and high traffic, which she feels is an impossible task—“To make it high-end, the content can only be long,” but long video platforms have too low traffic, while short video platform users “have long been unable to digest more advanced content.”
She does not like this job. She feels that from the Spring Festival to now, her truly effective working time is “no more than a week.” She candidly admits that her current tendency to multitask is still “very serious.” Sitting in the office, her brain is always “slacking off.”
She seems to have lost the ability to express herself in writing; whenever she needs to post something online, even if it’s just a paragraph, “it feels like there are endless comments popping up in my mind.”
She describes all this as “the aftereffects of short videos”: “My brain has been shaped like this by short videos.”
She decided to quit her job and travel for a while to regain her attention. She wants to go to Jingdezhen to learn pottery. “If my hands are covered in clay, I won’t be able to look at my phone.” she said.
The names Chen Ni, Yang Xiaoke, Xiao Jing, and An Ping are pseudonyms.
This article comes from the WeChat public account: Phoenix Network (ID: ifeng-news), author: Chen Mo, editor: Zhou Zhezhe, AI graphics: Gao Ziran.