Bedding must-haves - any recommendations?

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Would love to hear your recommendations for a good night’s sleep!

I’m surprised about the range of things online such as:

• memory foam mattress topper.
• heated blankets (especially the ones with a zone specifically for feet!)
• weighted blankets

Does anyone have one of these - how are they? Does a heated blanket impact bills much, if you use instead of central heating?

Also happy to hear any other recs for bedding, PJs or general sleep aides. My sleep schedule has been all over the place and I’m happy to try different things to help ease into a good routine again.

For me, giving up alcohol and taking magnesium glycinate is the best way to get good quality sleep.

I love my weighted blanket. Highly recommend.

I agree with magnesium. I’ve started taking it and my sleep has improved a lot. Life changing for me as lack of sleep triggers migraines and seizures.

I don’t live in the UK but travelled there in July/August, my first trip in summer.

Every hotel and air BnB we stayed in had no top sheet, just a doona in a cover. Of course it was far too hot to sleep under the doona and I can’t sleep totally uncovered.

Where I could I pulled the doona apart and just slept under the cover, which meant I had to deal with stashing the doona somewhere.

How do you manage this? I understand using a top sheet is rare in the UK, so what do you sleep under in the warmer months?

If it's very warm I sleep under a sheet, @Lostsadandconfused but that's maybe 3 nights a year.

It's unusual to have any sustained run of high temperatures in the UK. Even in a good summer it's not going to be very warm at night for a whole week. If you look it up, the average night temperature in summer is around 15 degrees.

You were just wildly lucky with the weather, I think!

Oh and back to say, sleep routines are the most effective thing! Routines, managing exposure to light, and then managing temperature.

Go to bed at the same time every night and get up at the same time in the morning. Wear an eyemask and get your room as dark as possible. This trains your body into producing the hormones to get you cycling down (melatonin) into sleep and up (cortisol) into wakefulness in a healthy pattern. This is how you stop grogginess in the morning.

Grogginess is caused by waking in the "bottom" of a sleep cycle. Your sleep cycle is likely around 90 minutes, and you want 5 or 6 per 24h. So this means you need to be setting a sleep time of either 7.5 or 9 hours, plus falling asleep time. It takes on average 14 minutes to fall asleep - this is where the 8 hours target comes from.

Everyone has a variance around these averages. If you have a bed partner and their cycle is 80 minutes, say, you might be constantly being woken by them at the worst moment in the morning and this gets very draining. In this case go to bed a little earlier than them. But you might find that your little sleep is the time to sync up. What is your little sleep?

It's very normal to wake up after a couple of sleep cycles. In fact you wake up at the end of every cycle but you're not aware of most of them. Especially as you get older, you're likely to become wakeful at, say, 2am. You'll be awake for an hour, and then sleep your other 3 cycles. This is a hormonal adaptation and nothing to worry about. Getting stressed out about this is likely to disturb your sleep, because cortisol is produced. (Pre-industrial society used this time to pray, have sex, maybe have a little read or a drink -- Pepys writes about it.) I have a cup of tea and do some yoga, then put a podcast on until I go back down.

The most important thing is to get up at the same time, whatever happens. Get up and if possible get outside and exposed to sunlight. You need to boost cortisol production, which is your wakefulness hormone, just like at night cortisol needs to go down and melatonin needs to go up - they are opposite to each other and this cycle is your circadian rhythm.

This is too much information, when all you wanted was to know some nice pyjamas, lovely bedding, sleep masks, etc. But it's worth knowing - sleep is so important.

A heated blanket uses barely any electricity. Buy lovely quality bedding- cotton. I have a wool duvet from

www.baavet.co.uk/

Good advice above on sleep routines.

But for the material aspect:

Good thick mattress of the right firmness for you. On a bedstead that doesn’t move about when you do.

Mattress cover or blanket under your bottom sheet.

Linen bed linen.

Sheet directly above you, under duvet.

Wool duvet. I use the highest tog pretty much all year round. It blocks out all noise and light and ‘holds’ you in bed, rather than disarranging itself if you dare to turn over. I am addicted to the weight of my bedding and generally find sleeping away from home at least mildly (sometimes disruptively) unsatisfactory.

Wool pillows.

Lastly, another duvet, or maybe a quilt, across the lower end of the bed. Again, it holds everything in place and makes the bedding feel secure around you.

With all this I don’t need an electric blanket but they’re nice to have if you want the heat or can’t tolerate weighty bedding.

Magnesium. Bedtime routine. Natural fibres with high thread count.

Ohh thanks for all the brilliant advice and ideas! Gosh, there’s so much that goes into a decent night’s sleep!

I ordered the magnesium supplement today and will check out all your recommendations now! I like the sound of all of these!

Some exercise or a walk then bath/shower, exfoliate and shave legs, magnesium, get into clean line dried then ironed cotton or linen sheets, silk or cotton pjs, maybe a hot water bottle, something scented with lavender or the Neom or M&S bedtime oils close by, good book or audiobook with a timer. No scrolling on phone.

And no stress at home or work also do wonders but those nights are few and far between!

Wouldn't faf about with weighted blankets unless you knew it would work for you. I have a heated blanket but that's for the sofa.

We usually have a few weeks of just using the duvet cover in summer when it's too hot for the actual duvet. I hate having a separate top sheet under the duvet though. I also dislike having the duvet tucked in or extra throws on the feet end as it makes me feel trapped, I suspect I would hate a weighted blanket. We also stick to a summer weight duvet all year round, with a crochet blanket over the top in winter. Different things work for different people, I also hate blackout and sleep better with a bit of light, I like waking up to daylight when sunrise is early enough or low light the rest of the year, waking up in total darkness is horrible. A bit of lavender pillow spray is nice.

I'm a lifelong insomniac (turns out I have ADHD) so take my sleep environment VERY seriously.

A weighted blanket did nothing for me, and I tried a wool duvet but hated it. I much prefer a big puffy down duvet to heavy blankets etc.

I have a goose feather/down mattress topper and goose feather/down duvet from Soak & Sleep, and have 800 thread count white cotton bedding (Savoy) from Richard Haworth. Pillows are also goose feather/down, with pillowcases on two of them being Richard Haworth's Savoy again and 2 of them being 25 momme silk pillowcases. I also have a V-shape pillow made from duck feather (so it's firm for sitting up reading) from Edinburgh's Feather Company.

I have black-out blinds plus 3 lamps (of varying brightness) that are controlled by Alexa as well as candles (from Tom Dixon/Anissa Kermiche). I've set a bedtime routine where I wish Alexa goodnight and she turns off the main lamp and pays soft classical music for 30 mins. I also have wireless electric diffusers (Neom/Lintros) with lavender essential oil on each side of my bedroom. I usually wear a silk eye mask from Drowsy (although when I wake up in the night it's usually around my forehead like a headband!)

For when I want to wind down (or can't sleep), I have my Kindle Paperwhite next to the bed plus a Roberts radio with pillow speaker. And when I've given up all hope of sleep, I switch on the big TV and soundbar and Sky Q minibox. 😝

I also take magnesium and anti-histamines before bed, and occasionally (when struggling) melatonin and/or JP's Dream Sleep.

I track my sleep on my Apple Watch.

It all sounds like a big OTT production but now everything is in place, it's like sleeping in a 5 star hotel. I also have a lovely antique wooden bed and a very deep sprung mattress that you have to almost climb up onto, and some beautiful artwork over the bed. I've made my bed area into my 'luxury space' and actively look forward to an early night these days. I don't wear anything to sleep in but have some lovely silk PJs from Liberty in case it gets too cold (hasn't yet!)

I get a great night's sleep and love my bed. For me the key things are:

A really comfortable mattress that doesn't squeak when you roll over.

One, good pillow rather than two.

Coverless duvets so no gaps between a duvet and cover, with a thick blanket over the top in winter and on their own in summer.

Eyemask to sleep.

Nice cotton pyjamas. I prefer long pj trousers with cuffed ankles so nothing rides up.

Before bed, reading my kindle. No other screens and no light on, it's gently backlit.

If I'm struggling to drop off to sleep or my mind is whirring I listen to the Nothing Much Happens podcast where she will read you a bedtime story. I don't think I've ever made it to the end of one.

I have a flat linen sheet and a summer weight duvet. When that gets too cold I add blankets and throws on top rather than changing to a bigger duvet, I prefer layers to one cover.
Bedtime routine is no reading in bed, just a bedtime story podcast that plays quietly all night.
I have a blackout blind but it has to be below freezing for me to close the window.
My cat sleeps on the bed with me. I have a daylight alarm clock that gets brighter for half an hour before it goes off. The light coming on is the cat’s signal to climb on me for a cuddle, and recently she has been having good night cuddles as well.

I brought the Fogarty calm and cosy weighted blanket from Dunelm the other day, It was actually really soft and perfect for making the bedroom a bit more comfortable.