#85, "The deep pressure you feel from being under all of that weight has a calming effect"

A few years ago I got a free 23 and Me for participating in some kind of study (honestly don’t remember what part of my genes I agreed to turn over to … (them it science Google?) and here is how 23 and Me keeps you coming back to their site: After they do their initial analysis of you they will every so often add a new “trait,” or some other discovery about you (or sometimes it’s a new terrifying new disease, and you have to click through a lot of different warnings and infographics before you can receive your prize of seeing whether you are a carrier for a variant of the gene, the best possible outcome is a lot of clicking and a final result of nothing).

The dangerous thing I have discovered about myself is that I love this. Just learning things about your body, in a tab next to other tabs! It seems so — I don’t even know how to describe it or why I enjoy it! Efficient and satisfying! Or nightmarish, take your pick. But it’s like when I clicked on an email to learn that Eileen was a girl. YOUR RESULTS ARE IN. I still can’t fully wrap my head around the fact that this is possible.

So anyway, as I was saying — to get you to keep logging in, every once in awhile 23 and Me claims to “unlock” a new thing about you. For example, I know that my genetics predict that I am 93% more likely to have wet, sticky earwax (true! Who knew there was another kind! Also, who knew that, a couple weeks after giving birth, earwax would literally fall out of my ears like wet snow — did this happen to anyone else?), that I am “likely to wake up at around 8:18 AM” (kids, though), and that I’m more likely to consume a lot of caffeine (true). It could all be crap, but all I had to do to get access to these fun facts was turn over my DNA.

I was thinking about this recently because on Cyber Monday I spent like three hours shopping for, and of course ultimately not buying, a weighted blanket. Why did I waste time doing this, I wondered. Do my genetics say something about “likes to be sleep under a pile of heavy blankets.” (They do not, at least not yet. I’ll check 23 and Me again later.)

The language around weighted blankets on the internet is really something. Here are some sentences from it. “If you’ve ever woken up on a cold morning under the weight of heavy winter blankets and felt incredibly calm and peaceful you’ve had a little taste of what deep pressure stimulation can do for the nervous system.” “Weighted blankets have been helpful for calming everyone from college students to animals.” “Weighted blankets — especially when wrapped around the body to create a swaddling effect — have demonstrated increased feelings of security.” “The theory is that the deep pressure you feel from being under all of that weight has a calming effect.” “On the surface, the blanket looks similar to all the others on this list, but it actually contains a series of small tubes that connect to a control unit (a boxy gadget that also needs to be plugged into an outlet). Before going to bed, you fill the control unit with water that then gets pumped throughout the blanket at whatever temperature you set via the included remote control.”

Google searches for “hibernate” have spiked in recent weeks and are the highest they’ve been in five years and I think it’s because we’re all kind of depressed and just sleeping through this shit and waking up thin, feisty and vaccinated sounds kind of ideal, frankly.

Derek Thompson @DKThomp

People throw around "inject that shit directly into my veins" a lot but when it comes to targeted bear-gene (yep) therapies to allow human hibernation during periods of winter lockdown, I cannot emphasize enough the degree I wish to have that shit injected directly into my veins.

Final thought on hibernation: I wouldn’t do it unless my kids also somehow could but then all be the same age when they woke up. I don’t want to go through this winter but I also don’t want to miss any of their things. I’m not sure how this would work with birthdays, I haven’t figured out all the details yet.

I remember the year Alice was one and we were still in New York and it was her first daycare winter break. When we returned to daycare after New Year’s, I said to another mom it had felt like Groundhog Day and then I said it to definitely at least two more parents because I was so clever. I would now like to retract this complaint and roll my eyes at my past self. We could go to museums and coffee shops and libraries! Also it was only one kid. We could — we did — sit in a corner of Barnes & Noble for hours just read-destroying brand-new books we were definitely not going to buy, eating snacks from home, I’m pretty sure I changed a diaper on the floor there once. Really, how did we not feel as if we were just on vacation all the time?

Alice to me yesterday: “Mom, what’s heaven like? Well, I guess you’re going to find out sooner than I am.”