Everyone and their mother is on social media. I mean that literally. I know dozens of mothers who Snapchat, fathers with Facebook and Instagram, and even a few moms who have Twitter. It can be hard trying to keep up. A new Snapchat comes in--time to respond. Your phone buzzes with a text. Respond. You haven't checked Instagram in an hour. Scroll. We're constantly worried about if we're liked, if our "snap streaks" are double digits yet, if people liked our profile picture or if we made it to 100 likes on Instagram. We stress out about how long to wait before responding to a message or a snapchat. We post stories to make people wish they were with us or to showcase whatever crazy things our friends are doing. We're constantly engaged with the world around us through technology.

And I'm exhausted.

On Monday, I woke up after a particularly stressful and hard weekend and the first thing I did was reach for my phone, and then a crazy thing happened: I stopped. What was I going to do? Answer all my texts and snapchats, check my likes on Instagram, and then check my Facebook notifications? Then I realized how absolutely disgusting it was that one of the last thoughts before I went to bed was "I wonder how many likes I get to wake up to tomorrow on the photo I just posted!" Pre-social media obsessed Riley wanted to kick iPhone addicted Riley's ass. Excuse my language. Honestly, I just hated that I could not remember what I used to do in my morning before I checked my phone. I think I legitimately just got up and ate breakfast and actually started my day. So I decided to do something a little different.

I went off social media.

Let me clarify. I deactivated my Facebook account and logged out of my Instagram with the intentions of staying off for two weeks (until my 20th birthday). I kept Snapchat because it's my primary mode of communication with my younger sister who is infrequent with texting, and my friends who are abroad and can't text.

So this is the end of week one (almost -- it's Saturday that I am writing this) without social media, and it's definitely been different.

First of all, I didn't realize how much I relied on Facebook as a method of communication. If I didn't have someone's number, I just messaged them on Facebook. That was tricky to get around at first, but with messenger as it's own little app now you don't need to be logged in or active on Facebook to message people, which made life a lot easier. I'm not sure if I count that as true social media, as I am really just using it in a "texting" sense. The other thing that is hard with Facebook is groups. I am involved in a bunch of activities on my campus that rely on Facebook as a way of getting out messages and communication for events and announcements. Luckily, my friends have been kind enough to screenshot things and fill me in on anything important so I haven't missed much (I don't think) yet, information-wise.

Instagram was surprisingly a lot easier to cut out than I had thought. Instagram is my favorite form of social media because I absolutely love photographs. I also love the fact that it acts as sort of an online scrapbook for lazy people like me who don't have photo albums or anything seemingly outdated like that. I also just love seeing my friends happy and succeeding, and I adore selfies. Pictures of my friends smiling or expressing themselves makes me happy. But honestly, after the first day of opening the app, seeing I'm logged out, finding that willpower and closing out, Instagram hasn't really been missed.

Another thing I realized is I'm on my phone a lot less. I am engaging with people in person, I actually want to check my phone a lot less and people are noticing that I am a lot more chilled out, willing to make actual plans and interact with people outside of the technology world. It's been super nice.

I will say the first two days were hard and I remembered Instagram was online and almost broke (well, kind of did -- I looked at a page), but then asked myself, "Why can't you just do this for two weeks? Do you really want to be that person?" The answer is no. I want to be the person who can engage in social media, but doesn't let it consume me.

So that's round one. We'll see how this week goes!