With any addiction, there is always a horrifying but necessary rock bottom that has to be endured before you can break through to the other side and attempt to be free of it.

With my alcoholism and cocaine addiction, it was a run of increasingly seedy benders where I abandoned my toddler daughter, my long-suffering husband, and all of my morals and values.

When it came to food addiction, it was a series of stomach-churning, snack-induced black-outs during that first Covid lockdownwhere I would find myself bingeing on Sainsbury’s cooking chorizo at two in the morning.

And with social media, it was discovering that I was sometimes spending upwards of eight hours a day scrolling on Instagram.

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This realisation came towards the end of last year, when I found myself weeping on my husband one evening after Instagram had told me my latest reel hadn’t performed as well as previous ones.

I felt terrible, and then I felt terrible for feeling terrible – pathetic for being reduced to tears by an algorithm.

Like drink and drugs before, I didn’t want to be spending the equivalent of an entire night’s sleep looking at Instagram, but I felt powerless to stop.

It was almost all I thought about: how could I create a post that lots of people would like, so that I belonged and remained relevant to my – oh my God, I can’t quite believe I’m writing this word – audience?

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On the surface, everything looked fine and dandy. Insta-perfect, even.

I had over a quarter of a million followers on the platform, and had achieved a great deal last year: produced a weekly interview podcast and an award-winning column for the Mail; written my first novel and signed a deal with a major publishing house; sold the rights to the movie for said novel; run a marathon in my underwear; helped to nurse my mother after a stroke; parented a tweenage child; managed my eighth year of sobriety after decades of alcoholism.

All of which might have made me feel something approaching pride, were it not for the insatiable Instagram algorithm that now existed inside my phone, the one that expected me to do all of these things and then create content about doing all of these things.

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‘Your reel is reaching new followers!’ the social media platform would congratulate me, when something I had posted had gone viral.

It was the same buzz as a line of cocaine, or a stiff drink – the buzz of validation, of belonging, and I longed for it every time I opened the app.

But sometimes, the algorithm chastised me, like a disappointed teacher. ‘This reel’s hook could be better,’ it would announce, when something got a paltry 80,000 views. ‘Not as many followers are watching past the first three seconds. Try making a better hook next time.’

My heart would sink, as I imagined my followers frowning at my content.

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I doom-scrolled through the feeds of other, far successful people than me – peers who had brighter content, better social media strategies, followers … I would punish myself for not reaching their dizzy levels of influence and feel like a failure.

For confirmation of this fact, I would read one of the many DMs I received each week from trolls, telling me how fat and disgusting I was.

It had all started so innocently. Instagram used to be a place to update friends and post pictures of nice sunsets. When I joined in 2012, the ‘social’ aspect of social media had enabled me to connect with other women who also had a background of mental health issues and felt imperfect.

But somewhere along the line, the app had turned into a serious habit that required feeding.

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Although I can’t say exactly when it tipped over from feeling fun to feeling absolutely necessary, I do know that on our summer holiday last year, I spent much of the time ordering my husband around with my camera phone, getting him to capture me in my bikini from a variety of different angles so I could create the perfect shot of my cellulite for a body-positive reel.

I had built much of my following talking about the fact that I no longer counted calories, and that I had stopped obsessing about numbers on a scale.

But what did any of that matter, if instead I was just obsessing about numbers on Instagram?

And it was in this endless quest for growth on Instagram that I realised I was shrinking my brain, my life, and my self-worth, which I had come to believe existed entirely in my social media metrics.

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So, just before Christmas, I decided to take an Instagram break. I deleted the app from my phone, and vowed not to reinstall it until 2026.

I felt jittery at first. My fingers, so used to automatically swiping towards Instagram, danced aimlessly on table surfaces.

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On a trip to Paris, I felt scratchy at all the missed opportunities: the Eiffel Tower shimmered without me sharing it online, and I was the only person not looking at the Mona Lisa through a smart phone lens.

In Cornwall for Christmas, I dipped in the freezing sea without forcing my husband to film it. I began to realise how many things I did, not because I necessarily enjoyed them, but because they made good content.

I started to leave my phone in a drawer, feeling allergic to it. In one week, I read four books. I also read an article about the decline of social media, and how I wasn’t alone in wanting to leave it: according to statistics, social media usage peaked in 2022 and is now in decline, with young people in particular rebelling against the ‘enshittification’ of their attention spans and their lives – a rather uncharming term coined by author Cory Doctorow to describe the process by which social media platforms suck people in with a quality product, before proceeding to abuse said users via algorithmic manipulation for maximum profit.

As my brain was freed up by the time I was no longer spending on Instagram, I realised I had become a sort of employee of Meta (Instagram’s parent company) – only one on no pay and with zero benefits. I was no longer working for myself, but for Mark Zuckerberg.

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Every time I opened that app, it was as if I was gambling, the algorithm telling me that maybe this time the reel would go viral, maybe this time I would win big. And I had fallen for it, hook, line and sinker.

Once , I had been reduced to a common addict.

When it came to reinstalling the app this week, I felt a bit like an alcoholic picking up a drink after a period of sobriety – both giddy and nauseous, all at the same time.

But after the initial cheap rush of notifications – the dopamine of a few new followers, the enticing lure of dozens of new DMs – I realised, with something approaching amusement, I had missed absolutely nothing. The same people were posting the same things, and absolutely nobody had noticed that I had gone.

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But most crucially, in not posting about my Christmas, I had inadvertently created my most perfect Christmas for years, one where I was truly present, felt properly rested, and began to feel the call to actual creativity – not the type that feeds tech giants, but the type that feeds me and the people around me.

Unfortunately, my line of work means I cannot forgo social media completely. But this time away has led me to recalibrate how I use it, so it works for me, rather than I for it.

I now allow myself to check Instagram twice a day, and set a daily limit of 45 minutes.

I will treat it like the food I used to binge, and only use it in moderation, in a way that nourishes me: so no checking my follower count, or the number of views on a reel, and I will only post if it’s something fun or creative.

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Let 2026 be the year I put social media in its place: out of sight, somewhere on the phone I keep for practical purposes at the bottom of my handbag, as I go about enjoying the real world, in all its unfiltered glory.