Welcome to WELLCARE Blog

You are undoubtedly familiar with the feeling of thirst: the parched feeling at the back of your throat and the need to drench that dryness with cool and refreshing water. Especially on humid and physically demanding days, it is severely tempting to guzzle water.

In Charles Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge (1840), there is a sentence that suggests that people used to sleep for two separate sleep periods. The text reads:

“He knew this, even in the horror with which he started from his first sleep, and threw up the window to dispel it by the presence of some object, beyond the room, which had not been, as it were, the witness of his dream.”

Sleeping between six to nine hours every night is a restful and restorative activity for people of all ages. Not only is this activity essential for growing children, but also for adults who have daily responsibilities to their family and work. However, modern life in a post-pandemic world, means that many of us do not get the high-quality sleep that we need.

In 2020’s Great British Sleep Survey, researchers found that an average person (age 18 or older) gets about 6.66 hours of sleep every night. While city-dwellers tend to get less sleep than those living in rural areas, the numbers are still close to the bare minimum hours of sleep the body needs.

When the sun goes down, experts have noticed that your circadian clock readies your body for bed around two hours before you go to sleep. The more scientific name of circadian rhythm is actually the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). This is a cluster of cells in your brain, directly connected to your retina that wakes you up or makes you drowsy depending on the amount of light in the room. That is also why you may have a difficult time falling asleep when the lights are left on at night.

Our bodies are very complex structures, and turning all of it off for sleep requires effort. In short, we actually have to work at getting rest, and the key to getting there faster has been the challenge that the sleep industry has worked towards solving ever since their inception.

There are plenty of factors that can help or prevent you from getting good sleep - diet, sleeping issues, psychological state - and each industry tries to solve this problem in their own way. One common solution is simply affecting the temperature of the sleeper when they fall asleep, but this isn’t as easy as you may think.

Do you know what goes up and down without having to move? Something we have but rarely notice?

In the hustle and bustle of our everyday lives, we are more often than not, simply attentive to details that we consider important or see as a priority. As the riddle implies, monitoring our body temperature is not always top-of-mind when it comes to improving our physical health, nor is it a daily element we think of.

The only time we ever pay attention to our body temperature is when we feel our body shiver from an oncoming fever.

Millennials have become famously branded as the “burnout generation,” unable to find time to clear out their thoughts and stop working for the day. Because of this, they are more likely to develop stress-induced illnesses and mental health issues. In a study under the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) of the United Kingdom, scientists found that people who are stressed more often are more likely to get sick.

Imagine that you’ve just arrived home from a long day at work. You crash on the couch and indulge in an episode from your latest Netflix show before making yourself a quick dinner. From there, you freshen up and get ready to hit the sack by curling up with a comfy blanket.

But then your thoughts start to wander. You find that the more you force yourself to sleep, the more active your mind becomes. Frustrated, you end up staring blankly at the ceiling and end up resorting to browsing through your phone in search of tips to help you sleep.

How often do you fall asleep with the lights (or a light source of some source) still on? You might have fallen asleep watching TV, forgotten to turn off the lights because you were too tired, or dozed off while working on your laptop. No matter the reason, you are not alone, as it is estimated that nearly half of all adults sleep with some kind of light on.

Electric blankets have become an indispensable partner for a good night’s sleep, regardless of the weather conditions outside. It’s extremely cozy to cocoon yourself in a warm blanket. There are many electric blanket models available on the market at a wide range of prices. How can you choose the one that is most suitable for you?

Wellcare compiled and analyzed nearly 800 comments positive and negative user comments posted to a popular German website about two single size electric blankets from the same brand but at different price levels. The first was a standard electric underblanket that entered the market in 2017, and the second was a deluxe model that hit the market nearly a decade ago. Both were 150x80 cm in size.

The comments revealed the features that consumers care about, and the inferred behavioral trends can help people to find the most suitable electric blanket among all the available options.