I admit that I’ve been a cover hog my entire life, but it’s not (totally) my fault. I move a lot in my sleep—which I can’t control—so I’d often swaddle myself in our shared blanket throughout the night, leaving my husband out in the cold. Getting the covers back was never easy, and on the nights I went to bed earlier than him, he’d have to wrestle them free, sometimes waking me in the process.
The morning I woke up wrapped in our shared comforter, warm and cozy, only to see him shivering under a too-small throw blanket usually reserved for the couch, I felt like an absolute jerk and decided it was time to find a solution. That’s when I finally suggested to my husband that we sleep with separate blankets.
My husband happily welcomed this new arrangement. We agreed that if we didn’t like the separation and wanted to be under the same blanket again, we’d simply switch back. But after just one night of sleeping the Scandinavian way, we knew we were on to something.
“The Scandinavian sleeping method allows you to create a sleep environment that works for you,” explains James Wilson, a sleep practitioner and educator based in the UK. This is especially helpful if you and your partner have different body temperatures, as my husband and I do. “As sleepers, we’re all different, so if we’re trying to buy a comforter that suits everyone in the bed, we often end up with one person being too hot or too cold.”
Sleeping Scandi-style solved our temperature differences literally overnight. With the freedom to personalize our respective sides of the bed with bedding that complemented our individual temperatures, we both immediately slept more comfortably. My husband, who runs hot, prefers to sleep in as little as possible, under a paper-thin blanket, while I’d rather wear a full sweatsuit with socks to bed and wrap myself, burrito-style, in a fluffy feather-down comforter. Before adopting the Scandi method, we’d always bicker over the bedding, eventually compromising with a blanket somewhere in the middle that neither of us actually liked. Now, we each sleep exactly how we want with the bedding we prefer.
Creating a sleeping environment that’s right for you in terms of comfort, support, and temperature is likely to improve the quality of your sleep, explains Wilson. It has certainly helped my husband and me sleep more soundly throughout the night, especially now that one of us isn’t left out in the cold night after night.
