How Weighted Blankets Are Helping People to Get a Good Night’s Sleep

Calming Blankets, an Australian-start-up, launched officially in the UK earlier this year, after selling over 50,000 individual blankets across the Aussie mainland. Helping people to get a better night sleep and reduce anxiety, their weighted blankets are available online from £119.00

A weighted blanket is made with a pouch inside that holds individual pellets – and the more pellets included, the heavier it is.

Giving you the feeling of ‘being hugged,’ weighted blankets emerged initially in the 1980s to help psychiatric patients to calm down in wards. But today, they have become part of the wellness and health industry that has skyrocketed in recent years.

Calming Blankets offer blankets weighing from 4.5kg to 9kg and occupational therapists suggest that the best weight for this type of blanket is 10% to 15% the bodyweight of its user. Users should ensure that the weight is evenly distributed across the entirety of the blanket.

A weighted blanket can bring numerous different benefits to its users, including reducing anxiety and helping those who have difficulty sleeping.

While weighted blankets have become quite a trend in recent years, they’ve been around for quite some time, with therapists finding that the deep touch pressure stimulation they help to produce can be beneficial for those with the following conditions:

Many studies have been conducted on how weighted blankets can impact on sleep levels, as well as their effect on both anxiety and stress.

According to a recent study, weighted blankets were shown to decrease nervous system over activity in 33% of participants. 63% of these participants also reported that they felt less stressed-out and anxious. In addition to this, a hefty 78% of participants reported that they preferred using weighted blankets to help manage “bouts of anxiety”.

These types of blankets can help people to generate proprioceptive input, helping the body to have an awareness of its environment.

Our brains are constantly sending signals around the body to help establish where it is in a particular environment. Sometimes these signals do not collect adequate feedback, which can trigger various different neurons to help find out more about the space that the body is in. This typically can make people feel stressed and unsettled.

Weighted blankets can help to prevent this from happening by applying enough pressure to the body so that the brain can access information about the body’s environment at a quicker rate. It helps the brain to relax, which in turn helps the rest of the body to relax too.

Calming Blankets makes weighted blankets to accommodate for all three of these factors. They come in a range of different weights (2.2kg, 4.5kg, 6.8kg and 9kg), and inner ties to ensure that the weight of their blankets is distributed evenly.

The start-up uses “super soft mink fabric – the one that’s usually used in blankets for babies”, helping to boost comfort levels for its users. The company have a variety of different blankets for both adults and kids, available in the colours blue, grey and white.