Unfollowing is self care

It's 11:40pm and Lucy has been doing fine all day.

She went to work. She laughed at something at lunch. She cooked, which she hasn't done much since Oliver moved his things out five weeks ago. She's in bed, phone in hand, meaning to set an alarm, and her thumb does the thing it does. Instagram. Stories. His.

It's a song lyric over a photo of a pint. That's all. No caption, no tag. And she's now lying in the dark decoding it. Is it about her? Is it about someone new? Who's holding the other pint? She zooms in on the reflection in the glass. She checks who else has viewed the story, as if that's a thing she can see. She listens to the song. Twice.

By 12:30 she's not fine anymore, and tomorrow she'll do it again.

If you've been through a breakup in the last fifteen years you know this loop. What you might not know is that someone has measured it.

In 2012 the psychologist Tara Marshall published a study with the wonderfully blunt title "Facebook Surveillance of Former Romantic Partners". She followed people after breakups and tracked how much they kept looking at their ex's profile. The people who kept checking were more distressed, more stuck on the ex, and reported less personal growth than the people who didn't. Not by a little. And crucially, this held even for people who'd stayed "friends" online and thought of themselves as handling it maturely.

Marshall's conclusion was careful but clear. Staying connected to an ex on social media doesn't help you move on. It keeps the wound open just enough that it can't close.

Guy Winch, a psychologist who wrote How to Fix a Broken Heart after years of seeing this in his practice, explains why the loop is so hard to break. Heartbreak, he argues, behaves a lot like withdrawal. The brain regions that light up when you long for an ex overlap with the ones involved in craving, and every glance at their story is a small hit. It feels like relief for a second. Then it makes the craving worse. You are not weak for checking. You're doing exactly what a brain in withdrawal does when the drug is one tap away.

Which is why willpower doesn't work here, and why Lucy telling herself "I just won't look" every morning keeps failing by midnight. The fix isn't more discipline. It's removing the tap.

Here's what that looks like in practice. Unfollow, don't block, unless you need to. Mute their stories and posts so the app stops putting them in front of you. Do the same for the friends and family who post about them, at least for now. Move the app off your home screen for a month. And when the urge comes, and it will, at 11:40pm, notice it as a craving rather than a decision. "I want to check" is information about how you feel, not an instruction.

Winch's other suggestion is the one that helped Lucy most. Write down, once, what you actually gain from looking. Then write down what it costs you. She had one line in the first column, "I'd know", and six in the second, including "I don't sleep" and "I feel like I'm still in it". She reads that note when the urge hits. It doesn't make the urge go away. It makes it easier to put the phone face down.

Lucy unfollowed Oliver on a Tuesday. She felt sick doing it, then oddly light. She still thinks about him. But she thinks about him less at midnight, and she's stopped decoding lyrics that were probably never about her.

You can't heal a cut you keep reopening to see how it's doing.