I opened YouTube to watch one Grammy performance. Two hours later I was watching a backstage interview from 2019.

Quick answer: YouTube Autoplay starts the next video automatically when the current one ends. For ADHD, the last frame of a video is the natural exit: it’s over, so you can close the app. Autoplay pulls in the next video before you reach that moment. To turn it off: open YouTube, tap your profile picture (top-right), go to Settings → Autoplay, toggle Autoplay next video off. Five taps. Not in Digital Wellbeing. And not one TrueTo applies for you.

What’s happening

Stopping things is hard for ADHD for the same reason starting them is: both require executive function — the cognitive effort to initiate a new action. The end of a video solves that. You didn’t decide to stop; the video just ended. That’s a natural exit. Autoplay removes the ending before you can use it.

Grammy season is when this compounds. YouTube’s recommendation engine connects the performance you watched to every adjacent piece of content: interviews, rehearsal footage, previous ceremony appearances. The queue is deep. And you can’t stop because the next one has already started.

How to turn it off

  1. Open YouTube
  2. Tap your profile picture (top-right)
  3. Tap Settings
  4. Tap Autoplay
  5. Toggle Autoplay next video off

Google’s own help page puts it directly under Settings. Written guides disagree about which sub-menu it sits in, and YouTube has moved it before, so check the Settings list on your phone before you go hunting.

Why it’s buried

It’s inside YouTube, in YouTube’s own Settings. It’s not in Digital Wellbeing, and it’s not in notifications, which is where people look for anything that governs how long they stay in an app. So the search usually happens in the wrong place first, and by the time you’re in the right app you’re scrolling a settings list looking for a word you’re not sure is there.

Turning it off means videos end. The exit point comes back.

This one you flip yourself

TrueTo doesn’t apply this setting. It’s on the /settings-for-adhd list marked Manual, which means the path above is the whole answer: you open YouTube once, tap five times, and it stays off.

A configurator that claims a setting it can’t reliably reach is worse than one that tells you which ones are yours to handle.

The bigger picture

TrueTo’s verified catalog for ADHD is 10 settings across 5 apps: Spotify Canvas, WhatsApp Read Receipts, Instagram’s activity status, Slack’s notification schedule. Canvas is one tap today; automation for the rest is rolling out, and every path is verified in the meantime. All of them chosen because they reduce the gap between what your instincts leave on and what your attention can actually sustain. Autoplay fits that description exactly, which is why it stays on the page as a manual step rather than dropping off it. The full breakdown, catalog rows and manual ones, is at /settings-for-adhd.

The Grammys were February 2. The queue is still going.