Lifehacker Guide to Building the Warmest Bed
It is cold there this winter – and it will only get colder. Because it’s hard to sleep when it’s too cold to relax, the Lifehacker team has put together their best strategies to make the warmest bed possible.
Use these tips as a guide: the more you add, the warmer your bed will get!
- Add extra blankets. (Yes, this is not difficult, but you have to start somewhere.)
- Arrange the blankets in the correct order. Put your knitted or crocheted Afghans under your duvet / duvet, not on top – knitted fabrics have air pockets that can trap warm air and keep it in whatever bed it should be. You can even put a blanket between the sheets for extra warmth.
- If you’re buying an electric blanket, read our guide and think about a heated mattress topper.
- If you don’t want to pay for a heated mattress topper, or if you need a way to keep warm while you wait for the mattress topper to arrive, try placing a blanket or blanket under your stretched sheet. This DIY mattress topper will help trap body heat inside the bed.
- Before bed, take a blanket and wrap it like a burrito. It’s also a great way to capture body heat and use it to keep you warm.
- Buy a good set of flannel sheets if you haven’t already.
- Layer up. Wear leggings under your pajamas, put on a sweatshirt over your pajamas, put on two pairs of socks. Add gloves and a wool hat if you like.
- Use a hot water bottle or one of the microwave- safe bean bags to warm your feet, or place a heating pad on the head of your bed. (There is nothing worse than not sleeping because your feet are cold.)
- If you use heating pads or hot water bottles to warm your bed, place them in bed at least 10 minutes before you enter. You can even put them in an hour earlier to keep your bed nice and warm when you’re ready for bed.
- Take a hot shower right before bed. This will warm your body – you get warmth that you can carry with you under the covers – and if you leave the bathroom door open while you shower, the steam will warm the rest of your home.
- Don’t like a shower? Try taking a hot bath instead.
- If you sleep with a partner, you should each have their own blankets. This will allow both of you to wrap the bedding tightly around your body and prevent the draft that could otherwise form between your bodies. (It also prevents your partner from removing the covers from your body in the middle of the night.)
- Do you both have insufficient duvets / duvets? Time for illogical tactics: sleep naked. In this case, you are not trying to keep your body heat as close to your own skin as possible – you are trying to share it with your partner.
- Have sex and / or masturbate, but do it under the covers to keep body heat from escaping. (See if it gets so hot it starts to sweat.)
- When it comes to avoiding body heat: When you wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, don’t toss the blanket back. It just lets cold air into your bed. Try to get out of bed without disturbing your layers of blankets and sheets so that they are still warm when you return.
- If you have pets, let them sleep in bed with you. Just one time.
- Wash your sheets often so you can pull them over your head without smelling the old sheet.
- You can stick your head out from under the blanket to keep it warmer than the rest of you. As Herman Melville wrote in Moby-Dick : “To enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, because there is no quality in this world that is different from what it is, just by contrast.”
What other tips for warming your bed could you share?