Charlotte Church claims ditching her smartphone "changed [her] life"

She wrote in a column for the Guardian newspaper: "I was secretly addicted as the anxiety carousel wheeled unwieldily.

"I couldn't focus, not even on a single app on my phone before I was drawn to another, 'distracted from distraction by distraction'.

"It wasn't just Twitter and emails I was monitoring with obsessive regularity: it was the weather, in places where I wasn't; it was my menstrual cycle app; it was the ticket site SongKick.

"And when all that was exhausted: scroll, scroll, scroll. It started to affect my relationships with friends and family, especially as the colours of our politics became our only interactions."

The 33-year-old singer - who has children Ruby, 11, and 10-year-old Dexter with former partner Gavin Henson and is married to Jonathan Powell - eventually decided to ditch her "iVampire" and after admitting to suffering signs of withdrawal at first, she now thinks swapping to a basic device was the best thing she could have done.

She wrote: "For the first few weeks I had a constant clifftop sketchiness, as if I was supposed to be doing something and couldn't put my finger on what. But that soon abated.

"I was still on Twitter, but it didn't follow me around the whole day, so I stopped responding to arseholes and only posted about stuff I really cared about.

"Gradually, I became aware that not only had I stolen secret time back from the flutter of hurried days, but somehow a secret space as well.

"I could stretch out, free to think again, to be wholly creative, to learn meaningfully and to switch off. It was like a cleansing spring shower had come to wash away the mucky detritus left after the long-cluttered winter of my mind...

"The change was worth it. It'll sound like an overstatement but I think it changed my life."