Weighted blankets are now trendy

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Last year, the best-selling Gravity Blanket parlayed a mega-successful Kickstarter campaign into a wildly popular product: one of the first weighted blankets marketed to the general public. Made in Shenzhen, China, and sold for $249 by the products wing of the New York–based Futurism media company, Gravity Blankets had grossed some $15 million in sales by May 2018. Last month, Time magazine named “blankets that ease anxiety”—the Gravity Blanket and other popular models that have hit the market since—one of the best inventions of 2018.

Weighted blankets have been used as sleep aids and calming aids in special-needs communities for years. Some of the earliest implementations date back to 1999, when the occupational therapist Tina Champagne began using weighted blankets to help some mental-health patients. Autism researchers such as Amanda Richdale at La Trobe University in Australia estimate that up to 80 percent of children with autism-spectrum disorders have sleep problems—which often stem from sensory issues, such as sensitivity to particular textures grazing the skin, according to Lindsey Biel, the author of Sensory Processing Challenges: Effective Clinical Work With Kids and Teens. Weighted blankets tend to decrease movement and thus friction. Many special-needs individuals also tend to experience overarousal of the nervous system, Biel says, and in recent years, the blankets have been implemented to help veterans with PTSD symptoms sleep through the night without panic attacks or night terrors.

But companies such as SensaCalm and Salt of the Earth have largely been relegated to footnotes in the sensational success story of the Gravity Blanket and the new generation of mass-market weighted blankets it has spawned. They get mentioned only passingly, and rarely by name, as a brief nod to the blanket’s origins.

t’s hard to argue that the proliferation of weighted blankets is a bad thing, from an overall well-being standpoint—the feeling of being held or swaddled is, after all, known to have a calming effect on all types of people throughout life. One could even argue that the weighted-blanket craze has helped normalize needing help getting to sleep at night or feeling calm. Biel, the occupational therapist, says it was “no surprise to see this wonderful and potentially powerful calming tool reach the general population.” Peters, the Salt of the Earth owner, agrees: “They’re an amazing thing, and I’m just glad they’re out there.”

Still, the mainstreaming of the weighted blanket seems to imply a conflating of chronic anxiety or sensory issues with feelings of stress—or, perhaps more ominously, the repackaging of a coping strategy that originated in a marginalized community as a profitable relaxation fad at a moment when people feel particularly stressed.

But the precise moment of the Gravity Blanket’s arrival may have also had something to do with its success. Mike Grillo, the co-founder of the Gravity Blanket, told Time that while he was aware that he didn’t invent the weighted blanket, he credited his product’s success to its look and feel (more luxurious than some of its predecessors, Time explained) and to good timing. “The 2016 election was still fresh in people’s minds,” he told the magazine. People were anxious and looking for relief.

Indeed, it’s not uncommon to attribute the new popularity of weighted blankets to a rise in feelings of stress and worry in the United States. In early 2018, Jia Tolentino wrote in a New Yorker essay titled “The Seductive Confinement of a Weighted Blanket in an Anxious Time” that “it struck me as not coincidental that Gravity’s Kickstarter success arrived deep into a period when many Americans were beginning their e-mails with reflexive, panicked condolences about the news.”

When I spoke to Grillo for this story, he characterized the surging popularity of weighted blankets as just one piece of the recent cultural obsession with sleep and its role in a wholesome, healthy lifestyle. At Futurism, he says, “a lot of the stuff the readers were gravitating toward were like the science of sleep and the science of meditation and mindfulness. So we started thinking of things we could build in that space.”

There are moments, though, when the mass-market weighted blanket seems to emphasize its clinical pedigree. While the most popular way for newer manufacturers to describe the appeal of their product is something along the lines of “It feels like getting a hug,” the more sciencey-sounding benefits are a close second: The Kickstarter campaign for the Reviv Blanket explains to readers that that feeling of being hugged “increases serotonin and melatonin, while decreasing the stress hormone cortisol.” Baloo Living writes on its website that “the deep pressure touch soothes the nervous system, alleviates stress and anxiety, and increases serotonin production.” Other brands, meanwhile, like to claim that their products can flat-out “reduce anxiety,” as the Amazon-selling brand YnM does in a graphic.

I have more ideas on how to make one; does anybody want these?