“…This data-derived notion of healthy YouTube usage is new to the literature otherwise devoted to listing negative psychosocial outcomes of social media usage (see Jang et al 2008 ; Karahanna, et al 2015 for notable exceptions). For instance, much is known about negative effects of social media usage including anxiety and fatigue (Malik et al, 2020 ), narcissism (Reyes et al, 2021 ), celebrity worship (Zslila, et al 2018 ) and cyberstalking (Begotti, et al, 2020 ). While the deleterious behaviors associated with YouTube, and addiction to YouTube deserve investigation, our study points to triggering of positive feelings; i.e., a sense of freedom, security, gaining focus, understanding and connectedness with the world, and a ‘feeling good about myself.’ YouTube usage emerges as therapeutic; it alleviates social dread; i.e., all social media engagement may not align with negative psychology, or reflect pathologies that deserve treatment and intervention.…”