How to stop watching YouTube Shorts (without losing YouTube)

YouTube Shorts can’t be switched off — they live inside the YouTube app you use for everything else. What works is a pause before YouTube opens that asks what you came for. Cortex app stops you for five seconds at the door, asks whether it’s work, leisure or autopilot, and counts every time you choose not to go in.

Why Shorts win even when you came for a tutorial

You open YouTube for a specific video — a recipe, a repair, a lecture — and the Shorts shelf sits between you and the search box. Or you finish the video you came for and the next screen is a vertical feed that plays without a tap. YouTube is the only app where the autopilot loop starts *after* a deliberate visit, which is why it feels unfair: you did come on purpose.

Shorts copy TikTok’s design one to one — full screen, autoplay, no end, no clock — but sit inside an app you cannot reasonably delete. That is the trap: the fix for TikTok (remove it) does not exist for Shorts, and a time limit on YouTube punishes the lecture along with the loop.

Why the YouTube limit backfires

A 30-minute limit on YouTube blocks the 40-minute tutorial you needed and does nothing about the six-minute Shorts detour that happens twenty times a day. Limits measure minutes; the Shorts problem is a sequence of tiny, unplanned entries. A pause at the door that asks “what did you come for?” separates the two.

Free version: a Shortcuts automation

Two minutes, no app:

1. Shortcuts → Automation → New Automation → App → YouTube, “Is Opened”, “Run Immediately”.
2. Add “Ask for Input” (Text): “What did you come to watch?” — typing the answer is the whole intervention.
3. Add “Show Alert” with the answer you typed: “Watch that. Then leave.”
4. Optionally add “Start Timer” (the length of the video you came for).

It cannot tell a tutorial from a Shorts binge and it fires over the already-loaded app. Cortex app’s intention question does the same job before YouTube appears, and remembers your answer for the weekly report.

What Cortex app shows when you tap YouTube

The shield, then five seconds. For YouTube the intention question carries the weight: “work, leisure, or autopilot?” — the tutorial is “work”, the Shorts reflex is “autopilot”, and naming the difference is what lets you keep one and drop the other. The mirror style (“how many times today?”) exposes the twenty small visits.

Then the decision: “do something else” is +1; “continue to YouTube” is −2. Because YouTube is often a legitimate open, expect more “continue” here than on TikTok — the score is not a guilt meter, it is a count of decisions made consciously.

What YouTube itself lets you change (and why it isn’t enough)

YouTube → Settings → General:

• “Remind me to take a break” and “Remind me when it’s bedtime”: dismissable reminders after N minutes or at a set hour.
• Turn off “Autoplay next video” — it stops the long-form chain, not the Shorts feed.
• On the Shorts shelf, tap the ⋮ menu → “Show fewer Shorts”: hides the shelf for 30 days, then it comes back.

All of them act inside the app or expire. None asks, before the app opens, what you came for.

The number

YouTube users spend about 85 minutes a day in the app on average — second only to TikTok.

DataReportal, Digital 2026 Global Overview (Android app-usage data, global average), via Exploding Topics — source

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