Wendie Trubow, MD, MBA, IFMCPPresident at Five Journeys, Functional Medicine & Wellness Provider, Best Selling Author, Passionate Champion for Health

How Weighted Blankets Work

2 Sept 2025 · 1 min

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1:03

Weighted blankets are quilted blankets filled with glass or plastic beads, typically weighing 10 to 25 pounds. They work through deep pressure touch, a form of stimulation that signals safety to your nervous system.

Questions this video answers

Approximately 10 to 25 pounds, sometimes up to about 30 pounds.

Glass beads or plastic beads.

Deep Pressure Touch (also referred to as deep pressure).

Chapters

For anyone who doesn't know. Can you tell people what is a weighted blanket, just in case? I think everyone knows, but just in case. I still meet people sometimes who haven't heard of a weighted blanket. So what it is is very simple. It's a blanket designed to weigh anywhere from 10 to 25 or 30 pounds, and it goes over your body and triggers the nervous system or tells the nervous system, I should say, that it's safe. And there's a cascade of responses and changes that happen in the body as a result from putting this deep pressure on the body. And it's been studied, it's been named Deep Pressure Touch. And so that's what it is. Most often you'll find a weighted blanket is made by a quilted pattern and filled with some kind of either glass or plastic beads inside. I've seen Reddit threads where people were making these, you know, before they became a trend, out of chain mail. And then other people will say, oh, when I was a kid at my grandmother's, it was cold and we used to stack a bunch of blankets on and make it really heavy. And that felt really great. And it's all the same thing. It's this mechanism of putting weight over your body.