Weighted Blankets: A Blessed Therapy or A Gateway to Madness?
There are only a few things that a person needs in life: food, water, shelter, and sleep. Holidays and social gatherings are paired with large feasts. Food is so important that some celebrations aren’t complete without specific foods to be consumed. Shelter in the form of large houses is more than a necessity in our society. People regularly use large and lavish homes as status symbols. Many people buy larger homes that they need and spend the majority of their lives paying off their purchase because there is a need in many people to live above their means. Sleep is the one thing that people try to live without. Sleep is not placed on a pedestal the way food, water, and shelter are. Many people try to live with very little sleep even though we all know how important it is to our lives.
Sleep is the most bittersweet component of a good life. You need plenty of it or else your time awake will suffer. Getting poor quality sleep will leave you sluggish and cranky. Lacking sleep can hurt your memory, kill your sex drive, age your skin faster than you would like, hurt your memory, and more. Sleep is free and its benefits are the exact things that people spend a lot of money trying to achieve through drinks, pills, and creams.
In my early twenties I suffered from severe insomnia for about 7 years. I was constantly craving sleep, but rarely getting any. Any time I’d get an inkling of tiredness - a whisper of sweet sleep, I’d lie down immediately and hope that I could fall asleep. If I didn’t act on it right away, it could quickly fade and I might not be able to fall asleep for an untold number of hours. Because of this, I’ve had roommates find me asleep under a dining room table, on the floor of the bathroom, in my car, or in the hallway in front of my bedroom. There was not a second to waste if sleep’s sweet kiss was within my reach.
I became an addict with no supply. Averaging 2-3 hours of sleep (when it happened) and routinely staying awake for consecutive days, you learn to view sleep differently than most people. I learned to see sleep like a warm and gooey cookie fresh from grandma’s oven, but in my case, grandma was also a ninja that was playing hide-and-go-seek from me at all times. If I sat down and cried, she might reveal herself to me, but most of the time it was a cruel joke - she would only want to be seen briefly and then vanish again. Always leaving me wanting more.
One day, I saw an advertisement on instagram about weighted blankets and it peaked my interest. Further research showed that they might help people fall asleep faster and get better quality sleep. Since the pills, breathing exercises, and meditation had little effect on me, I was happy to see another item to try. This might be the thing I’ve needed this whole time! My elation quickly turned to terror. My mind likes to jump to the worst case scenario in all things and this one had to do with what the blanket will do to me.
My fear was that the blanket will be everything that I needed to get good, quality sleep and with the blanket, I’d be able to get as much delicious sleep as I wanted. My life would be better off and I’d notice all facets of my life improving. Then one day I would acclimate to the blanket, leaving it powerless in aiding my quest for reprieve from my dreaded consciousness. I would then begin to chase the feeling that the weighted blanket first gave me: getting heavier blankets until a weighted blanket was no longer enough. I would need to find an upgrade. My fear was that getting a weighted blanket was merely a gateway to a new lifestyle that I’ve heard about but never wanted to participate in.
When I was little (and even as a teenager) I liked to sleep in boxes. I think the confinement was always exciting for me. There were, of course, the refrigerator boxes but I spent quite a lot of time in treadmill boxes, dishwasher boxes, I even forced myself into the box my trampoline came in until the box buckled and changed shape from a thin, long box to more of a clunky diamond looking box. I could spend a lot of time in these boxes and after a few weeks, the box’s integrity would be non-existent and I’d mourn the day knowing that we’d have to get rid of it.
Is it possible that this blanket might awaken something inside me? That need for confinement as a child could be a sign of something bigger lurking within the depths of my soul? Is it possible that inside of me, there’s a need to be smooshed? Will this blanket be enough or in a matter of months will I be paying people to lie down on top of me - giving me both relief and pleasure? This might seem like an extreme scenario, but smooshing people is a real profession. Getting paid to smoosh people is a lucrative career for some and for the people that need it, this is need in their lives. If a weighted blanket were to bring this part of me to the surface, I fear that my social circles as well as my pocketbook will take a turn for madness. Due to this fear, regardless of how ridiculous it might seem to some, I resisted ever getting a weighted blanket.
A couple years went by and I saw another ad for a weighted blanket. This time it had gel on one side so it will keep you cool while you sleep. All of the possible benefits, along with the cooling effect were too much for me to turn down. I knew the risks, but at the same time I saw the benefits as outweighing any negatives that may or may not exist.
If I was going to do this, I was going to jump into the deep-end. I needed to know my options so I did what many people do nowadays: I searched on Amazon.com to see what options were available. In my head, I wanted a heavy blanket. The idea of a 50-lb blanket was embedded in my mind from the start, but I couldn’t find anything over 25 pounds. 25 pounds? What was I, a small child? I had visions of wrapping the blanket around myself tightly like a burrito, so no matter how I moved in my sleep, I was swaddled in “heavy love” and unable to break free from my “sleep cocoon”.
I found nothing on the internet - Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Target, Costco, Macy’s, and even Best Buy was a no-go. Somewhere I read that anything over 25 pounds could be dangerous because people might have trouble breathing while asleep. When did these companies grow such a conscience? These companies use sweatshops, underpay their employees, and avoid paying taxes all so they can compete with each other over whose pockets are the most overstuffed. They don’t care about people. It should be my choice to take on the risks and as an American, I will live with the consequences. As long as my decision is not affecting anyone else, I’d like to make it for myself.
I thought about fighting back against the system. I thought about getting two 25-lb blankets and just doubling up, but that didn’t bring my burrito-fantasies any closer to reality. If any of you have ever tried wrapping yourself up with multiple blankets, it quickly becomes more of a chore than a delight. If I was going to do this correctly, it had to be with a 50-lb blanket. I looked into making my own but that was an insane amount of work and what if I hated the blanket as soon as it fell upon me? Maybe jumping into the deep-end was not the right first move. I decided to dip a toe into the waters and get a 25-lb blanket (with a gel side for cooling).
I’ve been using the blanket for several months now and I’ve got to say that it’s “okay”. The blanket has a grid pattern sewn into it so the little weights inside remain evenly distributed. It would be utterly unusable if this grid was not there. Unfortunately though, the grid is not perfect. Within the grid, the weights move to a signal corner and instead of a true “weighted blanket” most of the time it feels like someone sewed 20 corn hole bags together and tried to pass it off as something ground-breaking.
The gel side does have a cooling effect for about 5 minutes. Many times I wake up due to the gel being very hot. Apparently this gel sucks up all of the heat in my body until it is ready to be used as a weapon against me! Almost every night I wake up, throw the blanket off of me, and bask in the cooling effect I get without it. Sometimes I then fall back asleep and then wake up again, shivering, needing the warmth a normal blanket provides. Many nights, I choose not to mess with the weighted blanket at all and just sleep with a normal blanket or in a sweatshirt. The weight is a nice novelty but unless I’m watching a movie, I see little use for this blanket in my life.
There are many people that love weighted blankets and maybe the distribution problems I have are a direct result of the fact that my blanket is the heaviest I could find (25-lbs). Regardless, I don’t like the gel (and its after-burn effect in the middle of the night) and the blanket feels like more of a burden to me and I tend to sleep better without it.
Rest assured, I am still the same guy I was before picking up a weighted blanket. Luckily, I don’t yet yearn to be the bottom slice of bread in a Meat Lover’s Sandwich. Today I am safe, but I do think to myself periodically, “What if I had a 50-lb blanket?” Would such a blanket be the thing I needed? Was a 25-lb blanket a fool’s errand in trying to fill-in for what I wanted from the very beginning? I have some ideas on how to make a 50-lb blanket, as well as how the weights could be kept distributed without the bunching issues I hated in my 25-pounder. I think I could improve and forever change the weight blanket industry… but not today.
Go out and try a weighted blanket if you like. If you have one now, leave a comment down below and let me know what you think. Do you have any of the same problems I’ve experienced?
