what is the science behind weighted blankets and how do they reduce anxiety?
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Something to do with the vagus nerve that is responsible for the somatic sensations of having your ‘heart in your mouth’, you ‘stomach dropping’, feeling like your ‘insides are jelly’, and ‘butterflies in your stomach’. A lot of people describe existential anxiety as a mind and body experience akin to ‘floating/swinging through space’. A lot of existential anxiety tends to be pushed into people’s subconscious so they might experience it in their unconscious state of dreaming where we have less control over our thoughts and cognitions. I’m not sure if it’s always trauma related, but it seems to work a lot like trauma and how we see that play itself out in PTSD and PTSD related nightmares and/or dreams. A weighted blanket would aid in regaining that ‘solid’ feeling of gravity ‘holding you down’ and ‘grounding’ you. I have read that bodily grounding mental exercises are used a lot by those experiencing the onset of an anxiety attack.
I think ultimately it makes you feel more safely ensconced in a ‘protective cocoon’, which Anthony Giddens describes in *Self Identity and Modernity* as a sense of ‘ontological security’ (as opposed to ontological *in*security defined by R.D. Laing in *The Divided Self*). I suppose that we carry with us a physical, mental, and emotional memory of being in the womb that is somewhat replicated by the feeling of a weighted blanket.
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