‘Fear of missing out meant I had to be near to my phone’

Shackera Hutchinson was 13 when she started using Facebook. Within a year or two, she’d moved on to Snapchat, Instagram and Whatsapp.

“I used to spend a lot of time on them,” says the college student from east London, now 18. “When I was 15, I couldn’t go without my phone.” Fear of missing out (fomo) initially kept her hooked. “You come home from school and maybe some gossip’s happened and you want to hear about it.” Without scrolling through her feeds, she would have felt out of the loop. “I used a lot of social media, which meant I kept up to date with a lot of people, but I do feel it wasn’t healthy,” she says. Last year, she began doing “streaks” on Snapchat, where users must contact each other each day. “My highest one is coming up to two years,” she says. “I got really upset when I broke one with my friend.”

Rosa Silverman