Monday’s buzz about how big a hit Super Bowl XLVI was in the social media world is exactly that.

We saw headline, after headline, after headline all saying the same thing.

On Sunday, Twitter set a sporting event record with 12,233 tweets-per-second at its peak, up from 4,064 TPS in the 2011 Super Bowl.  Those numbers circled the conversation back to how great the game was, but Sunday’s tweets-per-second record says more about Twitter than it does the Super Bowl.

Outlining how Twitter is that much more engrained in our lives is hard to quantify, but the Super Bowl Twitter numbers show exactly that.  Sunday’s social media numbers say more about the rise of the medium than anything else, and that fact I think has gotten overlooked thus far.

What people are missing is the fact that undoubtedly more sporting and non-sporting Twitter records will be set (Olympics?, Oscars?) in the coming weeks, months and years because Twitter is growing so rapidly and is now a viable medium.

The real story here is Twitter’s growth, not the competitiveness and wildness of the Super Bowl.

Hopefully the headlines and the copy in the to-be-written stories about those future records will talk a bit more about Twitter’s growth and less about the event.

For approximately 111 hours this past week I went Twitterless.

I thought it’d be hard. I thought I’d be “behind” on the latest news and insights. But what I found out was that, in a strange way, I learned even more by shutting myself off for a few days.

A large majority of what I consume on a daily basis comes from Twitter. My breaking news, my sports scores, my work-related insights, my humor—Twitter is my aggregator of all things important to me. That, I hope, says more about the power of the medium than it does anything else. To take that away for 111 consecutive hours I thought would have shut me down and made me go nuts—but it didn’t.

The issue with Twitter is that I constantly feel like I’m trying to catch up. If I haven’t checked Twitter on a Tuesday afternoon from 3-4:15, that’s about 150 tweets—bits of information that may be crucial to work or my curiosity—that I missed. Not having the feeling of being behind was relaxing.

Most importantly, though, closing off one branch of my life opened another. I became a better listener at the various dinners or lunches I attended with family and friends. Instead of checking my iPhone while lying on the couch, I spent time with my two dogs (pictured).

Turns out, when I closed the knowledge acquisition part of my brain, I became more attentive and genuine.

I caught up with friends, became closer to family and relaxed in my hometown of St. Louis. I, like many others, still need Twitter, but maybe we all could benefit if we start to learn how to better balance the powerful medium with the rest of life.