You’re going to laugh at this. My wife and kids gave me a weighted blanket for Christmas. I have long known that I have sensory issues. For people like me, weighted blankets are supposed to give a better night’s sleep. Why? There’s science behind that. 

My oldest kid has sensory issues too, more serious than mine. We found this out when he was only seven or eight. My wife learned some techniques to help him get focused when he was sensorily overwhelmed. One of them worked on me, to an amazing degree. Once in those days we were in an IKEA in Dallas, and my wife noticed something wrong with me. I had a slight headache, and was feeling sleepy, and slightly disoriented. I thought maybe I was getting sick.

“Hold still,” she said to me. Then she came up behind me, threw her arms around me, and squeezed me tightly (but not too tightly), for about 12 seconds.

When she let me go, it was like she had given me an injection of something. Suddenly that blurry, logy feeling I had was gone. I mean gone.

“What did you do?!” I asked.

She told me she applied a therapeutic technique she had been taught for helping our kid. Temple Grandin, who is on the autism spectrum (sensory disorders usually accompany this) uses a “hug machine” that she invented to apply deep pressure to herself. She has written about how deep pressure has been documented by scientists to calm people with sensory disorders.

This is the same theory behind weighted blankets. My sensory issues aren’t that serious, so I didn’t really think too hard about weighted blankets. I bought one a couple of years ago, but it was too heavy, and unpleasant to use, so I got rid of it right away. And that was that.

This one — a non-cheap Sharper Image model my wife bought at CVS for half-price in the days just before Christmas — is perfect. It’s 20 pounds, which is slightly less than is recommended for someone of my size (one pound of blanket for every ten pounds of you), but just perfect. I’ve been using it since Christmas night, and I have been sleeping like a rock. Waking up every morning feeling totally refreshed.

Because I got up so early this morning, and was feeling a little sensorily undone after lunch for some reason, I decided I would get under the blanket to do some writing before the LSU game this afternoon. After about 15 minutes under the thing, I began to feel very calm … and decided to catch a little nap before kickoff.

I woke up four hours later, in a dark house. The third quarter was nearly over. I’m telling you, I was zonked. And thought I regret that I didn’t get to see the Tigers stomp OU in the first 3/4 of the game, I’m really excited to have discovered such a powerful tool to help me sleep. In fact, I didn’t know how bad my sleeping really was until getting this blanket. It affects me with almost the power of a sleeping pill.

The body is a weird thing. And the Force is strong with this blanket. I don’t know if there’s something about the way this particular blanket is constructed — again, it’s a Sharper Image model — or if this is something you could get with any blanket, but man, for someone who struggles to sleep, this thing has been worth every penny my wife paid for it.