 I quit smoking many moons ago after reading Allen Carr’s Easy Way To Stop Smoking. His technique felt counterintuitive – he encouraged readers to continue smoking while reading his book – but it was effective. Carr’s method has helped over 50 million people quit smoking worldwide, myself included.

I decided to take a similar approach ahead of my stay at Clinic Les Alpes, a luxurious rehab centre in the Swiss Alps that treats everything from burnout to substance abuse. Rather than gradually reducing my screen time before flying to Switzerland, I did the opposite. I doomscrolled late into the night, reached for my phone first thing in the morning and blatantly ignored the two-hour self-imposed limit on my social media apps.

Ever since screen-time notifications became a thing, my daily phone use has hovered between four and six hours; on a bad week, it can creep closer to seven. While it could be worse, the amount of time I’ve spent on my phone has been troubling me. There was the time my boyfriend and I were at a romantic Italian restaurant, and when the waiter came to take our order, we were both glued to our screens. Or the time I sat on the sofa with my dad on a visit back to the UK, and instead of talking to him, I was tap, tap, tapping away on my phone.

“How I broke my phone addiction after 3 days at one of the world’s most exclusive rehab clinics”