Modern Life: What is a gravity blanket?
A gravity blanket is a weighted quilt, filled with glass or plastic beads, generally weighing anything from five to 25 pounds. Retailers recommend you buy one that’s about ten per cent of your body weight.
I’ve just bought one for my longsuffering, sleep-deprived wife. Before I bought her a gravity blanket, she was up all night while I slept like a baby. Now it’s the other way round.
I paid £100 for ours, which appears to be about average (prices range from around half of what I spent to almost twice as much).
Until my wife asked me to buy one, I’d never heard of them, but they’re actually very popular. You can find a wide range of brands in department stores and also online, where they’re advertised as a cure-all for everything from insomnia to ADHD. Most people use them to help them sleep, but they’re also supposed to relieve stress and anxiety, and even alleviate panic attacks. So how do they work?
It seems the idea started about 20 years ago, with therapists treating autism. They noticed their patients were often comforted by lying beneath weighted blankets – or, in extreme cases, wearing specially adapted, weighted clothes.
It turns out that it isn’t just autistic people who find this sensation comforting (maybe we’re all a bit autistic, to some extent). Apparently, the extra weight applies something called ‘deeppressure stimulation’ to your prostrate body, which increases your serotonin levels and decreases cortisol levels.
It sounded like mumbo-jumbo to me. So I contacted Oldie Towers, keen to write a ruthless hatchet job about this newfangled fad. It turns out the Editor is a fan, and now my wife has become a convert too. She’s always been a fitful sleeper, but now she’s out like a light within minutes. She says it makes her feel secure and cosy, and stops her tossing and turning. I suppose it could be a placebo, but who cares? Either way, it does the trick.
Unfortunately, it’s had the opposite effect on me. I find it intensely claustrophobic lying underneath something that weighs as much as a small dog or a large baby. I hate the way it pins me down in one position. It makes me feel hot and bothered. It contributes to duvet creep. If only one of you is under the pesky thing, you might as well be sleeping in separate beds.
So are gravity blankets worth the money? It does seem a lot to pay for what is, effectively, merely an extremely heavy eiderdown – but my wife swears it’s worth every penny.
In a way, it’s nothing new. A lot of us had comfort blankets when we were kids, like Linus in Peanuts. Like Linus, I loved my comfort blanket, and my life has never been quite the same since my mother decided I was too old to have one and destroyed it. Maybe that’s why gravity blankets are so desirable – they’re merely grown-up comfort blankets, something reassuring to cling onto to protect us from the cold and lonely adult world.