It’s 2.30am on a dark, cold night during lockdown 2.0 and Harriet, a mum of two, suddenly wakes, wide-eyed. The house is quiet but she tosses and turns in the bed she shares with her husband in an attempt to settle back to sleep, but something is on her mind. She can’t resist grabbing her phone from her bedside. As the screen lights up between her fingers, she is surprised and excited, albeit with a twinge of shame, to see a list of Facebook notifications fill her home screen.
“I’d spend at least an hour quietly replying to messages and searching my feed for news in the middle of the night,” says Harriet, a 48-year-old TV producer from London. “I was addicted day and night and it definitely wasn’t conducive to me feeling happy.”
The sleepless nights and the constant phone checking – the need to scroll, like, share and comment – was not only interfering with her mental wellbeing,
