One thing that proved very useful for me was to decouple impulse from habit. Instead of immediately jumping to HN or "yet another youtube conference video for

One thing that proved very useful for me was to decouple impulse from habit. Instead of immediately jumping to HN or "yet another youtube conference video for some language I'm only tangentially curious about", I use a browser extension (Leechblock) to give myself a lot of time (an hour) at the end of the day. This trick works in two ways 1. when I feel that urge during the workday, my emotional brain thinks "oh boy! a whole hour of this at the end of the day! I can totally wait because it will be an hour!" 2. when that hour comes, I find I only browse around for maybe 10 minutes before I get bored. ymmv but after trying to go "cold turkey" for the longest time, this was the best solution I could figure out. I genuinely like the info on HN / certain parts of youtube, but having them as some emotional relief mechanism that I would get a "hit" from myriad times each day was the unhealthy part.