For one week, I eliminated social media from my life. This included everything from Twitter to Pinterest. In the beginning, I thought this was going to be a relatively easy task, but I was quickly mistaken.

During the first day, I did not have much trouble staying off of social media. But in the middle of the week, when I was on my phone, I kept catching myself scrolling my home page on my phone to try to find Twitter or Instagram. That was when I realized this challenge was going to be a lot harder than I thought it would be initially.

One of the hardest apps to give up was Snapchat, because it’s the most common app I use to communicate. This caused me to resort to other forms of communication, which was not necessarily a bad thing, but definitely took a little more work than sending a picture through an app.

Not only did not using social media change my communication habits, but it also changed how I spent my free time. Usually when I have some extra time I check my Facebook feed or look at Snapchat stories. Not being able to go on social media made me look through my news app, or go through my email and use other methods to spend my time.

This week did open my eyes up to how much I actually used social media and how addicted I really was to it. I think everyone should go at least a couple of days without social media. It might be a bit of a challenging change at first, but it will make one want to spend there time doing more productive things, even if it’s still through the use of a phone. Disconnecting might be a change, but in the long run it can make some realize that there are more things going on than just what is in our Facebook news feed.