I used to call myself a Twitter addict. It’s the first thing I check each morning and the last thing I look at at night. Yet during a family vacation in August I deleted Twitter from my phone for a week and didn’t check it even once. I didn’t vomit or convulse, as drug addicts tend to do when getting clean. I didn’t stop using because I had hit rock bottom. I wanted to be ‘in the moment’, as the kids say, and Twitter is a time-suck.

What I missed most was consuming a lot of news in a very quick manner — not the takes or the arguments, or the likes and retweets which offer that sweet dopamine hit. I was reading newspapers but I still felt out of touch. My addiction turned out to be an entirely correctable habit. If Twitter was having a negative effect on my life, I could have decided never to return to the app. Or I could return to the app in smaller doses. It’s not heroin, after all.

Most grown-ups can do the same. If social media is actually having a drug-like impact on their lives, they should stop using. But they don’t. They continue to ‘doomscroll’, all the while talking about how powerless they are to stop. At the end of September, the Wall Street Journal asked superstar quarterback Tom Brady, ‘What is the one habit you wish you could break?’ Brady answered, ‘I’d break that endless Instagram scroll that just sucks up minutes and hours of my day.’