I would just leave it running all the time as it does give a privacy boost by masking ur approximate location and not letting your ISP spy on you. If you are going to do things like torrenting or visiting websites the government won't like, at LEAST use a different browser that is hardened (let's say you use basic firefox for regular browsing, use Mullvad browser or something instead for that specific task), or just straight up use TOR if what you are trying to do won't require that fast of internet speeds. If you are solely worried about the VPN IP address, you can just switch to a different server to a different country.