endy weighted blanket review
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An Exhausted Mom Puts a Weighted Blanket to the Test

How the new Endy one shapes up against baby-related sleepless nights

What would you pay for a good night’s sleep? Before I had a baby, I might have gauged the value of a solid eight hours on an elastic scale, depending on what my weekend looked like or how much I’d enjoyed the late night before. But now, well, now there’s no upper limit to the lengths I’d be willing to go, the amount I’d be willing to spend to rest, just to close my eyes for a little while and let the sweet seduction of slumber render me absent from the waking world. Does that sound dramatic? It’s been harder for me to calibrate some of my more extreme emotions ever since a tiny, curly-haired infant came screaming into my life two years ago.

Since then, I’ve been running a sleep deficit that is well into the thousands of hours by now, leaving me dependent on an ever-increasing coffee order just to survive the light-filled hours of my working day. Sometimes the balance of rest tips in my favour, when my son sleeps a six- or seven-hour undisturbed chunk. On those mornings I am like Venus herself, rising resplendent from my shell ready to grace the world with my artfully mussed hair and infinite charms. But other times, like a few nights ago when he woke up at 2 a.m. screaming for apples, not exactly sympathetic to the fact that we had no apples in the house, well, those mornings I emerge resembling a bleak Norwegian expressionist’s rendering of pain. A hollowed-out face floating on a bridge, forever locked in a plaintive emotion somewhere between a scream and a cry. All to say, sleep is everything for me right now. I think about it all day, repeatedly imagining myself sinking down, heavy with exhaustion, into my queen-sized bed.

Most parents of young children probably harbour a similar obsession. While well-meaning people may try to warn you about how tired you’ll be when you have a baby, absolutely nothing can prepare you for what life is like on a constantly interrupted sleep cycle. It’s like living in a time vacuum with no view of escape. And other than the oft-repeated “sleep when they sleep” (which, okay, thanks for that advice but then when am I supposed to stare at my phone and pee in private?), most sleep advice for new moms is focused entirely on the baby. So you become an expert on swaddling and sleep sacks, you buy countless white noise machines and blackout curtains, and emerge a black belt on “sleep hygiene” for newborns. But your own needs for rest and repair go unaddressed.

“A new generation of sleep-enhancing products is focusing its marketing lasers on exhausted adults, depleted by the demands of everything from parenthood to anxiety to late-stage capitalism.”

That’s about to change. A new generation of sleep-enhancing products is focusing its marketing lasers on exhausted adults, depleted by the demands of everything from parenthood to anxiety to late-stage capitalism. From app-controlled adult nightlights to portable nap pillows, sleep is the new consumer frontier, sold as a respite from the challenges of modern life. The star of this slumber scene is the weighted blanket, a phenomenon that entered the collective consciousness in early 2018 with articles about its purported benefits sneaking into the content feeds of overworked millennials.

A concept that evolved from the deep pressure therapy often used to address conditions like anxiety and autism, the weight of the blanket is purported to help soothe the autonomic nervous system, which can help regulate your rate of breathing. It’s supposed to mimic the calming effects of a hug. Now, it’s set to go mainstream, with heavyweight mattress companies Endy and Casper coming out with their own versions, in the hope that the weighted blanket will become part of the average household’s sleep routine.

The sensory effect of the weighted blanket is definitely alluring. When I’m restless or anxious at night, I often imagine a literal heaviness overtaking me, wrapping me up and lulling me back into a dreamless state. So the idea of going to bed beneath a cocoon of physical pressure seems ideal.

When Canadian startup Endy’s new weighted blanket arrives at my door, I’m eager to try it out. The most stressful part is getting the thing out of the box and onto the bed. The “weighted” aspect of it is no joke: Filled with very fine glass beads that line the inner part of the quilt, this blanket weighs in at 15 pounds! Once draped over my legs, it feels like an oddly large, flat bean bag. Unfortunately, it’s single-sized, so my husband spends the beginning of the night trying to wriggle his way under part of it and then moves on to complaining about how unfair it is that he should have to sleep under a boring regular blanket. (Endy, for the next iteration, I would recommend looking into a queen-sized version.)

Limited size aside, my experience of using it is exactly as promised. It helps ease the transition to sleep, and makes the act of getting into bed feel hopeful. Here is this thing holding me down, promising to be a physical barrier between my body and the rest of the world. At one point I consider putting the blanket on my face, just for a second, to really lean into the cocoon experience. But that feels a step too far so I just pull it up to my chin and bask in the advantages of having my own blanket in a shared bed.

The hard science behind the blankets is still mixed, but the emotional and psychological impact feels significant for a parent struggling to find a sleep routine that works equally as well for me as it does for my child. Does the blanket keep my son from waking up in the night? No. But does it help ease me into sleep before and after he does? It does, surprisingly well.

 

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