With an ersatz-looking plush cover that recalls airline blankets, the Gravity Blanket has begged for competition. Late last year, Holden & Hay, a Colorado company that sells Merino wool bedding for babies and dogs, launched its own Kickstarter campaign to make “eco-conscious” weighted blankets printed with Native American motifs and stuffed with shredded “mom jeans.” And Ms. Hamm, whose company is named Bearaby (a neologism designed to evoke a bear hug and a lullaby, she said) now also sells the adorable, 20-pound Napper, a chunky knit throw in six colors ($249) that carries its weight in its yarn and would be right at home in a stylishly hygge setting.

Heavy bedding and other compression items have resonated, metaphorically and psychologically, as transitional object s for a population under stress. People on Twitter have been lobbing weighted blanket jokes, like a poster who wondered if he or she could make a cheaper version by pouring concrete in a comforter and lighting it on fire. Last April, the maker of the ThunderShirt, a swaddling vest made for anxious dogs, mocked up a web page offering a ThunderShirt for humans with fake testimonials. The company’s call center was flooded with inquiries. “It was for April 1,” said one operator last week with studied patience. An Australian company has designed greeting cards for lovers that proclaim, “You are my favorite weighted blanket.”

(It was late last year that the weighted blanket went from being an easy punch line to a woke parody , when a writer for the Atlantic wondered if the marketing of a product designed as a coping device for autistic people was appropriation. This generated all manner of retorts, the best of which came from a writer at Slate who is herself autistic.)

Enter the Sleep Pod, a gray spandex cocoon ($110). Its inventor, Matt Mundt, 28, has a background in mechanical engineering and a resume that includes product development for Apple. He has long been a poor sleeper, he said recently, and when he gazed upon the sleep space , as entrepreneurs like to say, and saw that it was heavy with weighted blankets, he was moved to innovate.

“I’m 6-foot-3 and I couldn’t bear them,” Mr. Mundt said. “I was overheating, my arms and legs were sticking out, the blankets were falling off the bed and it was just a mess. I have five patents. I knew I could do something better.” His solution was to make an 8-ounce pod from an elastic fabric that mimics, he said, the pressure of a weighted blanket but without the ballast, typically 10 percent of one’s body weight (most companies sell three versions, 15-, 20- and 25-pounders). It also solves the partner problem: each of you can sleep in his or her own pod as Mr. Mundt and his wife, Angie, do.

The Sleep Pod was not a success in my own household: “Get it off now!” said my panicked roommate, kicking frantically. I thought it was perfectly cozy, if not particularly snug. This made it bearable, for my own sleep purposes, but perhaps not therapeutic, from a pressure standpoint. And deep pressure is the main ingredient in a weighted blanket, which may raise serotonin and melatonin levels, say the makers, citing various studies , and in turn reduce anxiety. Just maybe.