Despite extensive research on sleep hygiene, all attempts to clean up my nighttime routine have been to no avail. I still look at my phone seconds before falling asleep and I love to work from bed, failing to follow Arianna Huffington’s advice to keep the bedroom a sacred tech-free zone. But I’m happy to share that one change has me sleeping better than ever before—and shockingly, my research efforts had nothing to do with it. Finding the secret to amazing sleep was actually an accident—one that ended a months-long struggle over the covers with my partner.
I must confess that even though I’m a middle child, I’ve never been great at sharing. When it comes to sleeping arrangements, I am what one would call a “covers hog.” Simply put, I think I deserve to be snug as a bug in a rug—and I will fight to make sure that that happens. When my partner and I lived in Spain, with its sweltering summers, this was not an issue. But when we moved to Scotland in the middle of a cold spell, bedtime became all-out warfare.
After spending the bulk of the nights yanking the covers away from my sleeping betrothed, who claims to have no recollection of these events, I snapped. Storming into our guest room, I gathered the extra duvet and ran back into our room, vowing to return it the next day. For the rest of the night, I slept in a perfect blanket burrito. Waking up completely rested and refreshed, I was amazed to see that my partner also had a great night’s sleep. Any tension about the month-long comforter power struggle had completely dissolved. It goes without saying that the extra duvet never made it back into the guest room. We are now proudly living in a double duvet household.
Elated by my discovery, I evangelized the benefits of two duvets to my friends who informed me that my insight was not a unique stroke of genius. Millions of people in Sweden, Norway, Germany, and Denmark have been doing this for decades. It only took one quick TikTok search to find hundreds of people sharing their tips for sleeping with two duvets, coined the Scandinavian Sleep Method. I will note that most of the blogs I’ve read about the Scandinavian Sleep Method have cited using two single-sized duvets, which is not what we’re doing. We’re sleeping in a super-king-sized bed with two king duvets. I swear by my Buffy Cloud comforter, so we even upgraded the second duvet to be a Buffy comforter as well so there wouldn’t be imparity between our duvets.
While I love the sleep benefits of a double duvet, the only issue I’ve encountered is figuring out how to style my bedding. While some people might not mind the two folded duvets laying side by side, I wasn’t in love with how it looked. Desperate for cute ways to make my bed, I turned to two-duvet TikTok to find the answers I’d been searching for.