I have a lovely friend Kirsty who made the same decision a few months ago, and she's been great at helping me to interrogate my relationship with social media. I came to realise that I had three key reasons for deleting my apps.

1. I spend too much of my time on social media.

This is definitely the easiest factor to recognise, and I'm sure everyone is guilty of spending too much time on their phone.

When I was considering whether or not to take the plunge and delete my apps, I (somewhat ironically) downloaded a new app called Moment. Moment tracks your phone usage - how long you use it for, how many times you pick it up, and which apps take up the most of your time. I already knew that my usage was bad, but I didn't know it was 4.5 hours a day bad. That's right, in an average day of 15 waking hours, I spent close to a third of that time glued to my phone.

I'm one of those people who's always complaining about how I don't have enough time in the day. There are so many things I'd like to do "if I only had the time", like cooking new recipes, reading, learning French and ukulele, drawing, blogging, practising yoga and meditation, going to classes at the gym... The list is endless. But here I am with over four free hours a day, if I can only tear myself away from my phone long enough to realise that I don't actually need it.

2. Social media doesn't serve me positively.

There's often talk about social media having a negative impact on self-esteem and mental health, but I don't think I ever took into account the effect that it's had on my own confidence.

I recently moved to London to start a new job and, while on the whole I am very much enjoying my new life, it has come with its challenges. In the more difficult times, scrolling through Instagram and seeing photos of perfect celebrities and even my own friends with their seemingly perfect jobs, perfect relationships and perfect lives really began to tear me down.

Interestingly, at times when I've been feeling down, I've had friends messaging me to ask how I am, saying that it looks like I'm having an amazing time - because of what they've seen of my life on social media. To think that I've potentially made other people feel bad about themselves from my posts makes me feel awful, especially when I know it's not the whole truth, and I've realised I don't want to partake in that kind of online culture anymore.

3. I came to realise that the way I use social media isn't healthy.

Leading on from that - and this was the hardest pill to swallow - I came to the realisation that the way I was actually using social media apps wasn't healthy. This is particularly strong with Instagram, where I won't always post the photos I want to because they don't fit with the theme of my grid, or I'll think about the time I'm posting something to make sure I make the most of people being online.

I've also begun to notice something even worse than these habits, where I've begun to be extremely self-critical of photos of myself, editing them with apps and filters to make myself feel better about my appearance. I started exercising more, not because I wanted to feel healthier but because I wanted to look thinner in photographs. My usage became about projecting a certain image of who I am onto the world as opposed to who I really am, which led me to question what I was doing it all for.

My main fear of deleting social media was how I would be able to show everyone what a great time I was having, but I came to realise that the people who actually matter know me on a much deeper level than my social media posts, and simply don't care about that projected image.