Kiwixotherapy: A weird but working therapy for introverts suffering from sleeplessness

If you’re an introvert who is suffering from both sleeplessness and also low self-esteem or impostor syndrome, I want to suggest you this therapy which I recently landed upon myself and seen many people recover from their insomnia or sleeplessness problem using it, and leading much happier and energized days now.

You’ll benefit from this therapy provided:

1. You’re an introvert who enjoys reading a lot.
2. Your insomnia is primarily due to Internet or social media addiction (continuously watching “unputdownable” shorts on Youtube, TikTok, etc. on phone).

The ideal advice here is to just put your phone somewhere far away from your reach and inaccessible so that the only activity you force yourself to do is do nothing but have a sound sleep.

But that’s not always possible. For one, the amount of toll it might take on your will-power could be enormous (there is a reason they’re called “addictions”!). Secondly, I’ve realized over the last few days that the reason most people always want to stay online is that at some deep level, they want to have a constant sense of connectedness with the world or universe at large. If this connection is broken, they’re staring into the abyss or void where the gravity of reality brings all the miseries of the world.

It’s almost like a red pill or blue pill thing, isn’t it! One way to gracefully come out of this illusory necessity you’ve created for yourself is to give your mind a substitute: An alternative “offline” version of that universal interconnectedness, one that doesn’t keep you awake (like youtube shorts) but one that’s reading material which will both enhance your knowledge and also gracefully make you fall asleep once you’re up for too long (like an encyclopedia article).

You see, a short video is just too interesting to watch and grabs your full attention to the point where it’s almost impossible to fall asleep (until that point of forceful no return like 4-5 AM which is really the time of waking up, not falling asleep!). An article or book, however, isn’t that attention grabbing. On the contrary, reading actually makes it much easier to fall asleep. How long do you recall you ever kept reading a book with the night lamp on without feeling drowsy and falling asleep right away?

And this is exactly where Kiwixotherapy comes in! Kiwix is an open source app which is specifically developed to enable you to download and read Wikipedia (the popular encyclopedia) entirely offline! The app is available for all major platforms including Windows, Mac and Android on their home page. Plus you can also get it from Google Play and F-Droid stores on mobile.

All you have to do is do a one time download of a Wikipedia dump through the app - the full version is about 95GB but smaller dumps are also available for most popular 50K articles, etc. which come in more manageable sizes of around 5-10GB. After that, you must make a habit of forcing yourself to disconnect from the Internet at bed time. If you feel like not disconnecting, remind yourself that there is a whole universe of knowledge and wisdom just waiting to be explored on your mobile phone! And real knowledge too, not just some opinions or trolling posts by self-proclaimed wizards on social media!

As you start reading the wikipedia articles while fighting your sleep, one of these two things will happen: either your knowledge will increase or you’ll fall asleep, and both these scenarios are in your interest or well-being. So, good luck and try this therapy today.