During my early childhood, I used to spend time with my family and friends all the time. Once, when I going home I was looking forward to playing some random games with my sister. Yet once I got home, my sister was sitting next to a new television set that was playing some old cartoon. That is when things began to fall downhill.

I watched at least 3 hours of television per week after that day. I still talked with my friends, played with my sister, and spent time with my parents. After about a year my parents bought a computer so they could work more at home and spend time with us. My parents sometimes downloaded programs that were educational and made me use them on the computer. I thought this box was just for education. I then saw my father play Star Wars Battlefront II, and I was captivated almost at once. I asked many questions about the game; what's that, how did you do that, and could I play? My father, seeing no harm, allowed me to play. Another step downhill.

I was introduced to the world of computer gaming, my family then played games with each other; Diablo II, Star wars battlefront II, and Minecraft. As my time playing games increased, so did my parent's concern. I began to spend all of my time on the computer, I would even say that my computer raised me more than my parents did. I sometimes even stayed up till 1 o’clock playing games. I was somehow doing ok in school, so it took my parents a while to see that I was losing sleep. When I got older and wiser I set my own bedtime to be around 11 P.M. This was better for me and my body, I then saw my test scores and advanced placement score increase dramatically. I still played on my computer of hours on end, my parents tried to place barriers. They failed.

I kept on playing and browsing the web, I still sometimes lost sleep. I always did my homework during school so I would have nothing to distract me. During class, I was allowed to use my computer, instead of doing my work I sometimes just went on random websites to do nothing. I always found school boring, for my entire life it was boring. The lectures just kept droning on and on. When I found that I could go online during those lectures, I was on the internet most of the time during classes. From that point on, I would just barely pay attention and whenever I did not know something I made educated guesses.

After a while, I realized that I had an addiction to technology. At first, I did not think that much of it and thought that it would not affect me that much. Yet, in school when work got harder I needed to work harder than I was at the time. I did not change and started to fail, then that is when I started to work on fixing my addiction. I had no idea how much of my life had been taken over by technology. I felt completely powerless.

I found out that the studied effects of prolonged exposure of technology are: isolation, lack of social skills, obesity, depression, increased bullying, more deceitful, stress, lack of empathy, no lasting bonds. I realized that I did have to gain some side effects from technology and that made it all the more devastating to me.

In the end, I slowly decreased the amount of time I was supposed to be on the computer and eventually had come to a great medium of around 3 hours. It was over the course of 6 months that I kept lowering my time of 30 min every month. I finally was able to redo all the things I did as a child. I was myself again.