Habit Challenge: Obey Your Thirst
Eight glasses of water a day or the 8x8 rule has been around in health circles for a long time. I remember my grandma telling me about it and how she kept 8 quarters on the window sill by her sink to help her track how many glasses she was having every day.
For me, I feel like it's common knowledge by this point that there isn't any factual basis in this claim — in fact, it's hard to even pinpoint when this claim gained the traction it has now.
In truth, there are no hard and fast rules about the amount of water we need to be drinking in a day. The Institute of Medicine of the National Academies published a 600-page report that created an "Adequate Intake" guideline for our water needs, about 11 cups for women and 15 for men. However, that adequate intake also includes the water we're getting from what we eat — I don't know about you, but I don't know how to measure how much water I'm getting from a milkshake, let alone something like a hamburger.
The biggest issue here is that our water needs are incredibly complex. From things like our gender, age, activity level, diet, any medications we're taking to environmental things like the temperature, humidity levels, and even altitude.
We all know this from a common-sense approach — if I'm out on a hike on a hot summer day, we know that I'm going to need to be drinking more water than if I was just sitting at home watching TV. This makes creating an accurate prediction of your water needs pretty complex.
Additionally, we can consider electrolytes as part of our hydration plan. Undoubtedly most of us know that electrolytes must be important, otherwise, sports drink companies wouldn't advertise them so much (Brawndo - the thirst mutilator, it's got electrolytes).
Electrolytes are tiny particles that carry electrical charges and come in a number of different forms, such as sodium, potassium, calcium, and magnesium to name a few. These electrolytes help us make the most of the water we're drinking by helping us retain and use that fluid.
Now to be clear here, we don't need to take in an excessive amount of electrolytes and with a proper diet, you can get most of them from what you are eating. If you are a heavy exerciser having them in some sort of sports drink can be beneficial though.
The other side of the issue of hydration is that it is possible to take in too much water. Hyponatremia is a condition where the concentration of sodium in your blood becomes abnormally low and this can occur from drinking excessive amounts of water. I'm talking about drinking at least a gallon of water or more within the span of just a few hours. In the more extreme cases of hyponatremia where people have died, they were drinking more in the range of 2-5 gallons of water.
That's a lot of water and something you're unlikely to hit unless you are really pushing yourself, but is something to be aware of. We don't need to be downing gallons of water in a day, let alone in an hour, to receive the benefits of proper hydration.
This leads us to the question though, what's so important about being hydrated or more accurately, what happens when we get dehydrated?
A study from the CDC found that 43.7% of Americans drink less than 4 cups of water a day and 7% don't drink any at all. It's clear that a good chunk of our population just doesn't drink enough water throughout the day. Anecdotally I'd also that this is something that a lot of us with ADHD specifically struggle with.
We can see initial signs of dehydration affecting our brain - we see things like:
Fatigue
Brain fog
Headaches
Mood swings
Poor decision making
But we can also experience things like:
Dry mouth
Chapped Skin
Cramps
At the initial phases of dehydration we're not seeing very extreme conditions, but none the less can have a fairly negative effect on your day. I know there have been many points in the afternoon when I wasn't keeping up with my water and found myself dealing with headaches and acting grumpy with the kids. It was only when I felt my dry mouth that the idea of dehydration kicked in. And the point here is that if I'm yelling at my kids because I'm feeling dehydrated, that's damaging to my relationship with them. That's not the person I want to be, but none the less I can easily become that person if I'm not taking care of myself and not drinking enough water.
I also find that the mid-afternoon slump isn't nearly as bad for me if I'm drinking enough water throughout the day. Sure, it'll still be there, but the amount of brain fog I have is severely reduced.
But I also want to acknowledge that there are a lot of myths that surround hydration as well.
Let's start with the idea that the only way to hydrate is through water. Yes, water is absolutely essential in your hydration needs but you can also meet those needs through things like water-rich foods. Fruits and vegetables can be excellent sources of water - just think about a nice slice of watermelon on a hot day. That will absolutely help quench your thirst.
On this train we have the idea of things like caffeinated drinks dehydrating us - while is it true that caffeine can act as a diuretic, recent studies have found that it doesn't actually serve as an efficient dehydrator. But then we also have things like beer where the alcohol absolutely will dehydrate you. Part of the deal with hangovers is that you're dehydrated - so if you are going to imbibe make sure to balance it out with some water every once in a while.
How about the idea that the color of your urine says how dehydrated you are? Well there is some evidence here and dark urine can be a sign of dehydration but urine color can also be affected by a number of other factors besides hydration. Eating certain foods like berries, beets or rhubarb can affect urine color as well as anything with food dye in it. Really anything in the spectrum from straw-colored to yellow is considered normal. If your pee is completely clear though, that might be a sign that you're drinking too much water (not an unhealthy amount, just that you could cut back a little - we don't need to be taking a ton of trips to the bathroom to be hydrated).
The Challenge
As I discussed earlier our water needs vary by a lot of different factors - this leads a lot of people to suggest only drinking when we're thirsty. Generally, this is decent advice, thirst is a built-in mechanism to keep ourselves from getting too dehydrated - but thirst also doesn't really kick in until we're about 1-2% dehydrated, which means we're going to see the beginnings of the effects of dehydration. This is fine if we get on top of things right when we feel thirsty, but we've also got ADHD and I can't say that I'm always great at picking up signals from my body. There are days I'll forget to eat lunch if I don't put it on my calendar. There are times when I realize that my bladder feels like it's about to burst simply because I was putting off getting up and going to the bathroom. And there are a lot of days that I don't notice that I'm thirsty until I'm well into the effects of dehydration.
Simply following my thirst cues doesn't always cut it for me.
Our first step here is a simple nudge to get us to drink more water. All we need to do is make sure that water is available to us throughout the day. Usually, when I'm ignoring my thirst cues it's because I don't want to have to get up and get a glass of water - it's because I'm doing something else and I'd have to stop. For me, this means that I keep a water bottle on my desk. I usually like to have something fairly substantial so that I'm not having to refill it too many times throughout the day. This doesn't mean you need a big gulp, but that's not a terrible idea either. It can also mean carrying around multiple water bottles, so if I'm out at my office I don't have to try and refill them by awkwardly tipping them in the water fountain. Sure it's a small thing but when it comes to creating habits it’s about breaking down those barriers that would otherwise slow you down. I know that if I have to get up to refill my water bottle and it's going to be a pain that I'm probably going to skip it even with everything I know about how important hydration is.
Next, we're going to want to start tracking how much water we're drinking throughout the day. Now I know many of us are going to head into this thinking that we're trying to create a goal here of how much we need to drink throughout the day, but remember there is no magic number. One of our biggest obstacles here is dealing with the myth that if something is a little good for us then more is always better. This is definitely not the case with water. We can absolutely drink too much water. We don't need to be heading off to the bathroom 10 times a day because we're drinking so much. And on that note, we can only absorb so much water at a time, this means that if we're chugging our water down we're going to be absorbing less of it and spending more time heading to the restroom. Ideally, we want to drink water more slowly, about 2-3 ounces at a time.
Okay, back to tracking.
Instead of trying to set ourselves a goal of how many glasses of water we want to drink in a day, instead, we want to just try and track how we feel based on how much we've had to drink. This is essentially a mindfulness practice - we're just trying to connect how we're feeling throughout the day with our fluid intake.
So really the tracking should simply be recording how much water we're drinking during the day. A good method for doing this tracking is to start off by standardizing how you're measuring and what I mean here, is just use one vessel for what you're drinking out of. That way when you're writing down what you drank you can simply write, I drank 4 bottles of water, or I had 6 glasses of water and you know exactly how much you had. If you're having to write down, I had a bottle of water, and a big glass and little glass plus I also had some water in a coffee mug... well that's not as useful for figuring out how much you actually drank.
When I went through this challenge I used an 18 oz bottle of water and just had some beads on a string attached to the cap that I could slide over every time I finished a bottle. I found that I typically felt the best with 4-5 of those 18 oz bottles.
Finally, our last step of our tracking is to reflect on how we're feeling and I suggest doing this through a little journaling. I'm not talking a whole lot here, just a few sentences examining how much water you had during the day and then seeing how you felt. The point of this part of the exercise is to really cement in how we felt and see what we can learn from it.
After we've tracked for a while this can also serve as a great way to check in on our hydration levels throughout the day. If I get to lunch and realize I haven't really touched my water bottle I know that I'm probably behind on my hydration. It might not mean that I'm particularly dehydrated but it does mean I should at least try and pay a little more attention and perhaps even set a reminder to check in again in a few hours.
So our challenge is to not try and necessarily increase how much water we're drinking but to really hone in on how our hydration levels make us feel. If you'd like to join in on the challenge I suggest trying it out for about three weeks - and make sure to let me know how it goes.
This Episode’s Top Tips
There is no set amount of water that you need to be drinking every day because our water needs are going to vary with things like gender, age, activity level, temperature, humidity, diet, and any medications we're taking. Our best bet is to follow our thirst and keep water available to us throughout the day.
Symptoms of mild dehydration include fatigue, brain fog, headaches, mood swings, and poor decision-making. We can often identify dehydration from dry mouth, chapped skin, or those headaches.
To help us follow our thirst we can work on setting up a mindfulness practice that helps us identify what proper hydration feels like. Track your water intake throughout the day for a few weeks and journal about how you feel when you've been drinking various amounts. Remember we're not trying to hit any number here, we're just trying to find what the right levels are for us.
