I bought a weighted blanket.

TL;DR: I bought a 15 pound weighted blanket, and so far the results are: nothing bad happened, there are some promising results and I intend to keep using it, but it didn't miraculously solve my sleep problems overnight like some people claim.

In the never-ending quest for a better night’s sleep, I bought myself a weighted blanket, specifically the Aricove Cooling Weighted Blanket, 15 pounds and 48“x72”, made mostly of bamboo fiber. I’ve been having on-and-off insomnia on a curiously every-other-day sort of schedule, and I have yet to figure out what’s driving it, but after reading through a ton of literature, not all of it positive, I decided to give it a go. Last night was my first night with the thing.

I decided to try this because this winter I noticed something: whenever it got cold enough that I needed two blankets, I slept better. The second blanket I used on those nights is a heavy wool blend thing given to me years ago by my sister-in-law, and I like it a lot. So there are two possibilities here: the first is that the distinctly different gradient of a warm body and cool head helps me sleep, or the weight of the blankets helps me sleep. It’s hard to test the first variable since it’s always confounded with the second variable, but with a weighted blanket I can test the second variable in isolation.

I guess the notion I’m going for here is that maybe coziness is was my body craves in sleep.

So first impressions. Well, it’s not very cooling. That may be because I also got a bamboo duvet cover, and it may be because I’m still living through my first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. Still, even though the weather outside was below 50°F and the thermostat was set to 59°F, I felt hot last night. Hot enough to take off all the other covers and just live with the weighted blanket, but I still felt overly warm.

The weight becomes very familiar very quickly. The first minute or so is a little peculiar, but after that it just feels… present. It’s nice, in a profoundly different way from other sleeping experiences.

For the first night, I did not sleep as well as I would have wanted. I go to bed at 10, and last night I had trouble falling asleep. My sleep tracker says I finally fell asleep around 11:40. (Part of that may have been the cats deciding to have a brief spat around 11 over who got to sleep with the humans last night.) Although once I did fall asleep the tracker says I did a very good job of staying asleep, which is a huge win for me. Typically, I awake around 3am and spend an hour or more tossing before falling back; that didn’t happen at all last night.

The other thing I noticed, and this is the most important to me, is that even though I was awake and troubled with not being able to fall asleep, I experienced much less anxiety about it. My thoughts were slow and ordered and generally much less fraught with the constant speed, shifting, and searching for answers to my discomfort. I generally accepted that this was a thing that happened to me from time to time, and just kinda drifted until I did finally fall asleep. Which was nice.

I’ll keep experimenting with the blanket, trying to figure out if it’s for me or not. One night is too little data to run on, but the results are promising, not revolutionary. Maybe I’ll take off the duvet cover; Aricove says you don’t need it, and the ordinary bed sheet should be enough to protect it from too much exposure to my sweat and such.