Quit TikTok — why short videos are the hardest to put down

Quitting TikTok is harder than quitting most other apps, because short videos are the purest form of variable reward available on a mobile phone: every swipe might yield something amazing, most yield nothing in particular, and the feed is endless. What you’re up against, then, isn’t a lack of willpower but a mechanism. What helps is either deleting the app completely or deciding when to stop before you start — trying to stop in the middle of the feed is the hardest way to go about it.

The slot machine with twenty spins a minute

The psychologist B. F. Skinner demonstrated that behaviours which are rewarded unpredictably — sometimes, but never with certainty — are the hardest to break. An animal that receives food every time it presses a lever will stop quickly when the food stops coming. An animal that receives food occasionally will carry on pressing long after the food has stopped coming.

All feeds are based on this principle, but short videos take it furthest. A clip lasts a few seconds. Every swipe is a new pull. In a quarter of an hour, you’ll make more pulls than you would in an hour scrolling through a standard feed of posts. You can find out more about how the reward works in the brain in the article on dopamine and scrolling.

You want more of something you don’t enjoy

Researchers Kent Berridge and Terry Robinson have shown that the brain has two partly separate systems: one for wanting and one for liking. They usually go hand in hand, but they can drift apart. That’s why you can spend an hour watching short videos, barely remember a single one of them, and still keep scrolling.

This is an important reason not to trust your gut feeling in the moment. Just because you want to watch one more clip doesn’t mean the next one will give you anything. The urge to carry on and the joy of carrying on are two different things, and in an endless stream, it’s only the urge that grows.

No end to stop at

In the past, most media had a natural ending: the last page of a newspaper, the end of an episode, the closing credits. Every ending was a point where you had to decide whether to carry on. Endless streams and autoplay remove those points. Carrying on becomes the default, and stopping becomes the only thing that requires an active decision.

That’s why ‘I’ll just have a quick look’ so often turns into an hour. You haven’t made a bad decision. You haven’t made any decision at all, because the feed never asked for one.

What research doesn’t yet know

It is often said that short videos are damaging attention spans, particularly among young people. This is a reasonable concern, but the research is in its infancy and is based largely on correlations: people who watch a lot of short videos report more difficulty concentrating. Whether the videos cause these difficulties, or whether people with difficulties are drawn to the videos, cannot be determined from such data. The article on screens and concentration explains why the shrinking attention span is largely a myth.

What you can rely on is your own experience: if the app takes time away from things you’d rather be doing, that’s reason enough.

Three ways to quit, in order of effectiveness

Delete the app. It sounds drastic, but for an app built around endless short clips, it’s often the simplest solution. A physical barrier is more effective than a promise to yourself. If short videos are available in other apps you use — many now have their own feeds of short clips — the same principle applies there.

Decide on the end before you start. If you want to keep the app, decide how long you’ll use it for before you open it, and set a timer on something other than your phone. The point is to make the decision before the feed starts pulling you in, not in the middle of it.

Move it off your home screen and log out. Every step between you and the feed gives you a chance to change your mind. It’s not enough on its own, but it reduces the number of times you open the app without having made up your mind.

Anyone who wants to take a more comprehensive approach to all forms of scrolling at once can read about quitting social media — and for the full picture, there’s the guide on how to stop scrolling.

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Zenith Protocol is a 30-day impulse control programme that trains you to focus on the moment just before you open the app: one short task a day and a button to press when the urge strikes. It’s free to get started.