Despite having 268 million followers on Instagram, Selena Gomez does not have the platform on her phone.
In a new interview with WWD‘s Beauty Inc. issue, the “Only Murders In The Building” star, 29, revealed she deleted all social media from her phone, “I do all of my posts through texting my assistant and the caption that I want.”
“I say that because that’s a huge, significant part of why I feel like I’ve been as healthy as I have been,” Gomez explained. “I’m completely unaware of, actually, what’s going on in pop culture, and that makes me really happy.”
She added, “And maybe that doesn’t make everybody else happy, but for me, it’s really saved my life.”
While Gomez’s phone has been social media free for three years, she first came to the decision after it just became too much.
“To be honest, I was just, like, ‘This is too much information,'” she said. “This is too much of my personal life spread out everywhere, and it just felt uncontrollable. I felt like my thoughts and everything I was consuming revolved around a million different other people in the world saying good things and bad things. And I just thought, ‘Why would I—I don’t get anything from it. Nothing is giving me life.’ And I just snapped, and I was over it.”
After revealed she wanted to delete the accounts and profiles altogether, her team convinced her otherwise.
“I’m happy I didn’t, because it is such a wonderful way to stay connected,” she said. “And when I do go on, it makes me happy to know that I’m just being completely honest and being true to who I am.”
The Rare Beauty mogul also opened up about her own mental health, her battles with anxiety and depression and bipolar disorder diagnosis. She’s also talked about living with lupus and her 2017 kidney transplant.
“There was this immense amount of pressure I had growing up that I felt like I needed to be a good role model,” Gomez told the mag. “And then I felt like maybe that was just unrealistic, and my life became very public really quickly, and I didn’t know that I was going through my own journey with mental health at the time. So, it was really confusing growing up, and once people created this narrative of my life, I realized I can’t be quiet anymore. I have to just address what needs to be addressed, and that’s me reclaiming my story, which is, ‘OK, yeah, I was definitely going through a hard time, and this is why, and this is what I deal with.'”
“It feels good to finally not care as much as I did,” she added. “I think of how many years I wasted just caring so much about what people thought, and it was just suffocating. And I think I wasted time doing that. What I love so far about getting older is that I’m starting to just really be happy with who I am, know what I want and know what I don’t want.”
Read more from Gomez at wwd.com.
