I Gave Up My Phone For A Month. Here’s What I Learned.

Photo by Warren Wong

“Hey, sorry I didn’t text you back the other day. I didn’t use my phone this week.”

I received this text from a friend of mine, and immediately began to panic.

“What happened?” I quickly responded. “Did you lose your phone? Did it break? Are you severely depressed and withdrawing from the world?”

“Nah. It was a challenge for school. Who could go the longest without their phone. I won. One week.”

“Oh,” I texted back, breathing a sigh of relief. “Well, congrats.”

“Yeah. It was really hard. I mean, I bet you couldn’t do it.”

I paused. Looked at the words on the screen.

“I could do it,” I typed back. “I could do it for even longer.”

“Fine. How about a month?”

So began my one month hiatus from using my phone.

The rules:

• I couldn’t use my cell phone or anyone else’s.
• I couldn’t use the messaging feature on my mac.
• My phone had to remain off for the entire challenge, not just in airplane mode or with wifi turned off.

Why I did it