Social media is something that has tremendously affected this generation and something that today’s teenagers can’t go a day without. It has a major impact on the daily lives of all people. Social media is now becoming more relevant in aiding with education in schools, as well as jobs and home life. Nowadays, we can use technology to reduce the amount of paper used. When being used in jobs, social media is heavily used depending on the job that you have. For example, it’s a great way to promote one’s job and what they do. Also, it’s a great way to get information out to people such as new inventions, ideas and events. There are many sites such as Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Pinterest and more that are frequently used for many purposes.

I recently decided to go a month without social media to see how it would affect my life and my surroundings. It was nerve racking, considering the fact that I use social media on a daily basis. After going a month without it, I realized that many things have changed; the first one being the relationships with my friends and family.

My relationship with my family got much stronger. I was able to spend more time and bond with them. Instead of jumping right onto my phone to see what people were posting, I had more time to watch my family’s favorite movies or sing and play music with them. Which is a huge part of my family’s life.

“I think that if I put my phone down I would have a lot more fun with my friends,” sophomore Grace Acello said. “I wouldn’t be focusing too much on what’s going on on my phone.”

At first, my bond with friends was weird. So many of my friends are addicted to social media that it was hard for me to have them be on their phones while I could not be on mine. After awhile they would eventually notice and put their phones down. It was nice to be able to hangout with them and talk about things we never get the chance to talk about. We got to laugh and really enjoy each other’s company, instead of being completely distraught by technology.

At first, it was very difficult to get away from social media. I felt like I was missing out on all the events going on at my school and with my friends. It was all I could think about for the first week.

According to the Odyssey, those who withdraw from social media suffer similar side effects to drug addicts that are withdrawing from an addiction.

That feeling eventually got less and less intense and I was able to enjoy life just living in the moment and being able to notice things going on around me.

My grades and my motivation were two aspects that dramatically changed during the month of being separated from social media. I was able to get my homework done faster because I wasn’t getting a snapchat every minute. My GPA went from a 3.2 to a 3.7 very quickly. I noticed that it made me feel proud and accomplished.

Overall, this experience taught me a lot. I think that it is important for kids to know that there’s so much more to life than what’s on our screens. Teenagers today have so much potential and it’s sad to see what phones and social media can do to distract us from all the important things we can accomplish. I challenge a lot of you to just see how quickly things in your life can change. It will be really hard to get away from it for a while, but don’t give in.