Selena Gomez Reveals Approach To Social Media That 'Saved My Life'

Selena Gomez has hundreds of millions of followers spread across Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and other social media platforms, but she has none of these apps on her phone — for good reason.

The 29-year-old "Only Murders in the Building" star revealed in a new interview for WWD's Beauty Inc. issue that she does "all of my posts through just texting my assistant and the caption that I want."

At the moment, she has 268 million followers on Instagram, 65.2 million followers on Twitter, 36.3 million followers on TikTok and 29.9 million subscribers on YouTube. But according to Gomez, she's been much happier after taking social media apps off her phone three years ago.

"I say that because that's a huge, significant part of why I feel like I've been as healthy as I have been," the pop star said. "I'm completely unaware of, actually, what's going on in pop culture, and that makes me really happy. And maybe that doesn't make everybody else happy, but for me, it's really saved my life."

Gomez—who's been in the public eye since appearing on "Barney & Friends" as a child—has dealt with anxiety and depression in her own life. She's also had to cope with lupus, had a kidney transplant in 2017, and last year, she revealed she was bipolar.

The singer told the outlet that there was too much of her out there for public consumption, which felt "uncontrollable."

After realizing that she wasn't getting anything from consuming everything she was getting from social media, Gomez said she simply "snapped" and deleted her accounts from her phone.

While Gomez initially wanted to delete her accounts altogether, her team convinced her to keep them. "I'm happy I didn't, because it is such a wonderful way to stay connected," she noted, "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."

Gomez has been using her platform for good, including to spread mental health awareness. She's also dedicated 1% of sales from her Rare Beauty brand to the Rare Impact Fund, which aims to raise $100 million over the next 10 years to provide more mental health services for underserved communities.

At one point, Gomez was the most-followed celebrity on Instagram, beating her ex-boyfriend Justin Bieber and best friend Taylor Swift in 2016. She admitted at the time that social media was addicting, and she found herself deleting the Instagram app once a week from her phone.

"As soon as I became the most-followed person on Instagram, I sort of freaked out," Gomez told Vogue in 2017. "It had become so consuming to me. It's what I woke up to and went to sleep to. I was an addict, and it felt like I was seeing things I didn't want to see, like it was putting things in my head that I didn't want to care about. I always end up feeling like [explicit] when I look at Instagram. Which is why I'm kind of under the radar, ghosting it a bit."

Gomez will return on HBO Max with the third season of her cooking show "Selena + Chef," which premieres on Oct. 28.