Ever found yourself dozing off to a YouTube video, only to wake up hours later with your history filled with endless auto-played videos? If this sounds familiar, you’re in luck—YouTube is testing a new sleep timer feature designed to prevent just that.
YouTube Sleep Timer: Limited Access and Experimental Phase

Before you get too excited, there are a few caveats. The sleep timer is currently only available to premium subscribers, and it’s still in the experimental phase. Even more frustrating, the test is set to end on September 2nd. After that, there’s no guarantee that the feature will become a permanent addition to the platform. It might roll out officially or vanish entirely—there’s no way to know for sure.
If you’re a YouTube Premium subscriber and want to try out the sleep timer, you can enable it by visiting the experimental features page on YouTube. Once activated, you can easily set the sleep timer while watching a video on your phone or desktop. Simply navigate to the settings menu during playback and select your desired time interval, after which the video will automatically stop.
While it’s great to see YouTube exploring features that enhance user experience, it’s unclear whether the sleep timer will survive beyond the testing phase. Let’s hope this isn’t just a one-off experiment and that the sleep timer becomes a permanent fixture on YouTube.
Pokdepinion: While this might be useful for a good number of people these days, there’s a bit o fun in seeing what channel / video you’ll end up landing on when you wake up several hours later. Could be a fun way to be introduced to newer channels we wouldn’t normally watch.