Baloo's Weighted Blanket Feels Like the Hug I Needed

Sometimes, the one thing you really need to feel better is a giant, fully wrapped bear hug. And when you don't have someone who can give you a hug that would make even Winnie the Pooh jealous, a weighted blanket can be the next best thing. Weighted blankets have been proven to help with anxiety and create an increased sense of calm since the weight lowers your heart rate, and it's that sense of calm that I'd been searching for to help improve my sleep. Enter the Baloo Weighted Blanket ($179), which I put to the test to see if it really would bless me with the elusive sense of relaxation I craved.

Baloo's weighted blanket has a lot going for it. It's 100 percent cotton, which means it's soft and cool, and you don't have to worry about getting too hot under all that weight. Wintertime in a New York City apartment can be sweltering since the building controls your heat and often decides to make your room hotter than a subway platform in July. So being able to use this blanket for the coziness and weight but not get overheated is really nice.

It has quilted seaming that keeps the glass microbeads that provide the weight in place and evenly dispersed. That means you don't have to worry about all of the blanket's filling shifting to one side or the other or constantly having to readjust the blanket. It has a clean design that looks great on my bed, and it has small loops around the edges in case you want to encase it in a duvet cover to match your room's aesthetic. In fact, it really doesn't "look" like a weighted blanket. It just looks like a nice quilt that's not too bulky, and you'd have to pick it up to really realise that there's more to it than meets the eye.

I've tried weighted blankets in the past, and I find they do help with calming anxiety and de-stressing, but I was never able to find a weighted blanket that fully covered the surface of my queen-size bed. The Baloo Weighted Blanket comes in four sizes: a 12-pound throw blanket, a 15-pound queen blanket, a 20-pound queen blanket, and a 25-pound king blanket, which is intended to be shared. Each is designed specifically to sit nicely atop the entire mattress, and if you're looking for a blanket that extends over the edges of your mattress, there's the Baloo Weighted Comforter ($219), which keeps the weight centreed over the top of your mattress, but allows extra blanket to drape over the edges of the bed. I love that this blanket actually covers my entire mattress and that it's large enough to really get wrapped up in.

The general rule of thumb for picking out a weighted blanket is to choose one that's about 10 percent of your body weight, so if you weigh 150 pounds, you'd want a blanket that's 15 pounds. When testing out this blanket, though, I decided to choose a heavier option, as I'd previously tried blankets that followed the 10-percent rule and I found myself wishing they were heavier. I wanted to feel a little bit smothered, so I went with the 20-pound blanket. The only downside of getting the heavier blanket was hauling it up three flights of stairs to my apartment, but after getting it to my bed, I've found the heavier-than-usual blanket was a great choice for me and has been really nice to get snuggled up under at night. Sometimes the extra weight means it takes a bit more effort to readjust the blanket when I roll over, but the flip side is that the weight is so soothing that I don't toss and turn throughout the night as much, so there's less readjusting necessary.

If you struggle with constant tossing and turning throughout the night or you have anxiety that tends to keep you from sleeping, this blanket could be a huge game changer in your quality of sleep. It's a little something extra that cues to your body and mind that it's time to calm down, and that you're in a safe place. After a few weeks of sleeping with this blanket every night, I don't think I could go back to sleeping without it.