I'm so interested in this topic, for a weird reason.
Since I was a kid, I've thought I was "prone to migraines", and ascribed various triggers to them - sun exposure, heat, physical exertion, mental exertion, etc. I'd get a migraine sometimes after a long hike on a weekend - and also a long business meeting entirely indoors in an air-conditioned space.
Only when I was around 35, did I figure something out. All these situations lead to me getting dehydrated without any obvious accompanying feeling of thirst. Hiking all day will do it - walking around an outdoor shopping mall on a hot afternoon - or sitting in an all-day business meeting focused on the work at hand and forgetting to drink. And all these situations lead to a migraine - my only "migraine" trigger is simple dehydration, nothing more complicated.
The weird thing is, it took me a long time (decades) to put this together, because I just figured that I couldn't be dehydrated if I wasn't thirsty, and I had no association between "feeling thirsty" and getting a migraine.
I get what I consider normally thirsty in other circumstances, but somehow there's a failure mode where my body doesn't warn me. So now I just remember to chug lots of water (and electrolytes) if I'm exerting myself even if I don't really feel thirsty, and I can systematically avoid triggering migraines.
Now that I understand it the association is quite clear and obvious in retrospect.
A quick note for people responding, you might have a mild form of vascular dysregulation or flammer's syndrome. It can manifest as migraines and a decreased sensation of thirst, as well as other symptoms like cold extremities.
Afaik it's pretty harmless in general but it is associated with certain vision issues (normal tension glaucoma). Glaucoma is irreversible but has many treatment options especially if caught early. But you MUST go in for a (fast, cheap, painless) screening to catch it, it's really hard to detect unless there are issues otherwise. Please consider this if you really are showing a lot of these symptoms.
I have had mild tinnitus my whole life (with no obvious lifestyle cause), and my migraines do often manifest as pain / pressure behind the eyelid. But I don't have any of the myriad other symptoms listed for Flammer syndrome - I sleep fine, my blood pressure is fine, I'm pretty solidly built (not underweight), I don't get cold easily, etc.
It is interesting to consider I might some sort of related disorder, though!
I would still consider the glaucoma check. I don't think that you can even necessarily get a Flammer syndrome diagnosis, it's not a disease afaik, just a pattern.
Glaucoma is the condition that matters and if you don't run the (fast, cheap, painless) check you can miss a serious issue.
I used to have warm and sweaty hands. Since I picked up bouldering I realised everyone is using chalk but I hardly sweat in my hands (I still sweat). My hands felt colder, and I don’t feel thirsty that if I don’t drink enough water it triggers headache. Took me quite some time to associate the headache with dehydration. Thanks for the reply. I will try to get myself a check up
Just get the glaucoma check (I don't think that you can even necessarily get a Flammer syndrome diagnosis, it's not a disease). That's the condition that matters and if you don't run a formal (fast, cheap, painless) check you can miss a serious issue.
I just remember reading that adults start to lose their ability to sense thirst.
Wikipedia says 50:
In adults over the age of 50 years, the body's thirst sensation reduces and continues diminishing with age, putting this population at increased risk of dehydration.
It's a big problem for the elderlies, it snowballs into serious issues. Don't feel thirst -> be dehydrated -> UTI -> hospital.
And having to be stay at a hospital for a length of time for any reason is very much Not Good for an elderly person. Other illnesses, muscle atrophy, disorientation, loneliness, cognitive decline...
Hospital -> Social home, then what you have said ... and then death.
As someone who has a relative working in a hospital and another in a social home (for the elderly, but these days we get 50 years olds with dementia which is crazy), they experience it.
It is not necessarily about dehydration, but that plays a huge role, too. Sometimes a simple yet unfortunate fall is enough.
I'm 56 now and I'd agree. I bike in the summer for exercise and I drink while on the go as needed. I always got a headache after exercising. A regular headache not a migraine (never had one).
My discovery was Pedialyte it's meant for children but it's like the adult version or Gatorade. I drink it before I exercise and also drink as needed. I feel normal no headaches not dehydrated.
edit: I also have hypothyroidism so my hypothalamus must also be crap at regulating my thirst maybe?
Tangential: I remember when I was a kid, adults always told me to drink more. Apparently I never drank enough, but I don't think it's ever caused me any problems. As an adult, I started drinking a lot of water - I drink easily 4 liters a day. Not even sure why. And now I always tell my kid to hydrate...
I remember the same. As I approach 50, I do notice that I feel much more tired and mentally foggy when I fail to remember my daily water bottles. I've had to develop specific routines that help me remember to fill/drink my water bottle which goes pretty much everywhere with me. For being such a necessity, it sure is an oddly hard thing to remember to do.
I think adults tell kid-me to drink more water was a way of trying to get me to just develop a habit with it, since they understood the seemingly paradoxical struggle of keeping hydrated at their age.
This 1000x. Anytime I get depressed my first response now is I need more sleep. Not to say that this is the answer for everyone, but yeah, I've noticed the same thing.
You might as well be my dream self writing a journal, because this describes my experience 1:1. It's kindof wild how long it took me to realize that I wasn't overheating at night due to the weather or the A/C being broken, but simply due to needing more water. That's one of my strongest signs as it turns out.
I don't know what "thirst" feels like at all! It's weird because I do feel hunger. If I forget to actually eat, my stomach kicks my brain and refuses to let me concentrate until I fix it. Hydration has no equivalent, and in retrospect, it's no wonder I was suffering headaches and nausea all through college on my diet of mostly soda. After I switched to water as my primary beverage things improved dramatically, but it's not perfect. I still have to watch the signs and pay attention, or I'll dehydrate myself by simply forgetting to drink.
> I don't know what "thirst" feels like at all! It's weird because I do feel hunger.
(I'm not an expert so take with a grain of salt)
This is it! Your hunger! It's actually thirst! When you're "hungry", try drinking a glass of water first. (Some people use this trick to lose weight, others, to stay hydrated...)
This was a very important realization for me. That many times when I felt small cravings, the main thing I needed was not something sweet but water.
Before I would drink milk, lemonade etc. But now I just drink water. Helped to regulate blood sugar better during the day.
> I just figured that I couldn't be dehydrated if I wasn't thirsty
This is what I learned, but from others online. I also learned that sometimes our body/mind may mistake thirst for hunger and we may end up eating some food instead of just drinking water (this is generalizing things a bit). This made me a little more aware of what I think of as hunger signals and I started tracking water intake (other than from food) everyday.
BTW, a tiny nitpick: it’s “led”, not “lead”, when you talking about the past.
I grew up in a hot climate spending a lot of time outdoors, and I was educated about staying hydrated from a young age.
Still, like you, when I get symptoms of dehydration, I don't feel any intuitive connection with the need to drink, and I often don't feel any urge to drink at all. I have to remind myself to drink even though I don't want to.
It's weird. You'd think something so essential for life would have a better regulator.
In activities prone to heatstroke, the advice is similar. Even for people with normal thirst detection capabilities, by the time that you realize you're thirsty it's likely too late. You need to be proactive about drinking enough water.
I can't relate more. I am also prone to ophthalmic migraines and have the same tendency to not be thirsty, to the amazement of the people I usually trek or live with. Only recently (35 and a kidney stone) did I gather that I might actually be in need of water even without feelings of thirst. I have never made a connection with migraines, and that might not be it for me but reading you makes me want to pay attention.
Hah, same. I recently started getting many more back to back meetings than usual and, by lunchtime, I had a headache most days. It took me a while to realize that, while I’m at my desk, I keep drinking from the huge water bottle that I keep there, but when I go to meetings, I don’t. I started carrying the bottle with me (when I remember) and the headaches are gone.
Same here - there are other feelings than a dry mouth or "feeling thirsty" that tell me I need more water. The slight beginning of a headache for example, or feeling a little bit dizzy, or many other things. I guess I could call these "feeling thirsty" since I now know when I feel these things that I probably need water and that's how I interpret them.
In my late 40's I realized I don't get thirsty. I did when I was younger.
I'm also a big sweater so I dehydrate quickly.
I found that I would get dehydrated to the point where my body tissues would reduce in volume or something and my Eustachian tubes would open up. They would either pop as I breathed or actually transmit my breath sounds directly into my ear from my throat. Concerning, yes.
Soon after drinking a lot of water this would go away. I soon realized that I was lacking a sense of thirst and was really stressing my body. Now I make drinking a habit.
I also discovered that dehydration was a migraine trigger for me. I tend not to get big headaches now but get quite intense visual aura / disturbance.
Interestingly I also discovered that electrolyte supplements were also migraine triggers for me.
Leading me to think that electrolyte imbalance was the actually trigger. Caused by too little water increasing the concentration or added salts increasing it.
I tend not to feel thirst very strongly and think I do often confuse it with hunger.
I pay loose attention to urine colour as a gauge and make sure I drink plenty, kinda robotically when playing sports / walking in heat etc.
When somebody complains about headaches, the first think my family does, and so now do I, is to ask whether you have drank enough. I thought this is common knowledge.
When I was in my 20s I realized I had lost the thirst signal. I never felt thirsty. I guessed this was because I lived a comfortable life and I had lost this signal in the noise of modern life.
So I set about deliberately retraining myself. I stopped drinking everything but water (and beer, because life) I'd exercise (and sweat) and then drink water. I retrained my body/mind to savour the pleasantness of drinking water when dehydrated and after a year of conscious effort I more or less recovered the sense of "thirst" and would pre-emptively desire drinking water.
Maybe a related point is that hangovers, of which headaches are likely the most common symptom, are caused in a large part by dehydration as well as electrolyte imbalance.
A friend of mine always goes around parties and tells everyone to stay hydrated. It always feels completely out of place, and also it's saved me from many hangovers...
I'm probably misunderstanding the article or you, but as I understand it you are talking about different things.
The article talks about the proportions between water and sodium, while you are talking about just filling up the tank with both.
I too drink water with sodium (and a few other salts) to relieve oncoming migraines but this has to be something else than the article is talking about.
Nvm, sitting with it for a bit I realise that when I drink salty water and it relieves my migraine my body needs either salts or water and by giving it both it takes what it needs and gets rid of the other.
It took me to teenagehood and then finally around the same time did I link it togtether.
Glad to know I'm not the only one and I do wonder how I missed this obvious step. Lately I've been doing electrolytes/water cliche of pocari sweat/etc and it really helps focus, weight, energy, etc.
I used to work for an industrial company that had a lot of plants which, by the nature of the work they did, were often extremely hot - a lot of them had urine colour charts in the toilets to try and warn people about dehydration.
I think I have the same problem. I'm ever dehydrated now, but if I am I can tell something is wrong because my head starts to feel fuzzy (don't even know if it's the right word).
I used to get really bad migraines and a neurologist gave me a prescription. The only time I used it I felt like absolute shit. Never took another one.
YES YES i get migraines and it's my body saying "Hey you need more water to function you know ?" usually i don't feel any thirst nor hunger, although, i do get hungry more often, but i can last a day without food before my head starts to hurt
"However, animals like us do not experience salt desire as a powerful, controlling drive as we do with oxygen, food and water." (from the article).
I disagree with that, especially when I was young. I would crave salt. I would lick my hand and sprinkle salt on it, then lick the salt off. I would break chunks off the salt lick block we had for our horses. I would lick the homemade play-doh my mom would make because it tasted like salt.
There's no substantiation for the claim in the article that we lack a salt craving. Apparently, the author hasn't, but I know a lot of people that do.
Breaking and hauling concrete patios in the Florida sunshine, I learned to take a couple of salt tablets with my gallon or two of water per shift to prevent incapacitating symptoms of thirst. Gatorade was both not enough electrolytes and the sugar spike too quickly dissipated. On the flipside, distilled water strips excess ions.
Same here. On recent Indian trips, I got hit with mild nausea after sweating in summer weather. I couldn't believe I wasn't able to go around like I used to few years ago. Had to bring along mildly salted water and take couple of sips now and then.
That was one part of the article I found questionable-
"If the body needs salt, those chips will cause a surge of pleasurable dopamine to flood the brain. If the body doesn’t need salt, that dopamine drip disappears"
Surely this second part is false? Most of us have got used to high levels of salt in modern diets, and prefer the taste of salty things even when we've had way more sodium than we need.
I have the opposite problem, after one glass of water I feel full and drinking any more makes me nauseous. It’s a struggle to get sufficient hydration during the day.
Try adding a rehydrating powder mix, the same stuff they use for treating diarrhoea. It’s just salts, glucose, and citric acid. It is hugely more hydrating than plain water, with a much faster onset of feeling relief from intense thirst.
Sports drinks are basically the same thing, but with excess sugars for “energy” (and weight gain).
First off, it doesn’t have to be plain water.
Secondly, the two liters a day was two liters of moisture, not drinking two liters a day; food is included in this amount
When my wife was ill a few years ago the doctor suggested Angel Delight[1] to help maintain fluids. Until then it hadn't occurred to me you're still effectively drinking half a pint of milk when you eat a bowl.
I own a dairy cow and milk twice a day. I drink a lot of milk. For me, it’s definitely not as good for hydration. And unless you skim it thoroughly (yuck!), it contains an obscene number of calories. It’s not a great substitute for water, but it tastes far better.
You gotta clarify what "take care of your teeth afterwards" means, because brushing your teeth after eating lemons is the worst thing you can do. Best thing is to do absolutely nothing.
One theory is that the most important nutrient that we really need a certain amount of every day is protein, and thus the body wants us to keep eating until it thinks we've got enough protein. (And for the vegans, I'm not saying meat - even most green plants and mushrooms are about 1/3 protein by dry weight). In nature almost every food has some amount of protein. If you get meat, you don't need to eat that much for your body to have all the protein it needs. If you are eating cake, it will take an awful lot of cake to have an adequate amount of protein.
In evolutionary past, if one had access to fresh fruit it might make sense to eat a lot of it right away since it won't keep, and the sugar in the fruit is easy for the body to store as fat and use later. In nature it's very rare to find a diet with very high fat and low protein but suppose you live by a macadamia tree, you may need to eat a lot of calories worth of macadamias to get enough protein. I have a feeling though that excess fat can go right through you in some cases like that - because there have been times where I was binging on peanut butter, like easily 16-24oz in a day often, like 2-3000 calories extra on top of my normal diet, and I didn't gain weight, I think a lot of it went through me undigested.
These are just hypotheses I'm not claiming they are necessarily the reason, and definitely are not the only mechanism involved as it's extremely complex. But they make sense as a simple place to start.
>I have a feeling though that excess fat can go right through you in some cases like that - because there have been times where I was binging on peanut butter, like easily 16-24oz in a day often, like 2-3000 calories extra on top of my normal diet, and I didn't gain weight, I think a lot of it went through me undigested.
Yeah I know chunks of nut can get through undigested but in this case it was creamy peanut butter, "natural" but not crunchy. I wonder if it may have been because of the quantity, that the body was like "nope we don't need all that" or what.
I thought this was because the protein can (partially) neutralize stomach acid. Proteins contain an amino group which can be protonated; carbohydrates and fats do not.
So dumb to see office workers sipping all day on their gallon water bottles, while outside the workers in the sun on the construction site taking the occasional sip.
Back when I worked in heavy construction (aka, trench digging for telcos) I went through about six liters of soda a day when it was hot outside. And no, I was not diabetic, I was just very intensively working out!
The problem is, too many people in construction don't give a shit about their bodies. Corporate greed, incompetent/uncaring bosses, toxic masculinity, plain old incompetence and/or people "set in their ways"... these are the guys you see at age 50 with their spines shot, skin crumbling (or outright cancering out) and a plethora of health issues.
> So dumb to see office workers sipping all day on their gallon water bottles, while outside the workers in the sun on the construction site taking the occasional sip.
Dumb? People can't just drink their darn water as much as they please without getting judged now? What's your point?
It is still weird to see the health fad/moral panic/potomania in the US, about "drinking enough water". This is a borderline mania, that doesn't exist in other countries- including ones with hot climates.
No, you are not "chronically dehydrated". The rest of the world isn't, and you wouldn't be either if you drank "only" two liters a day instead of a full gallon.
This is one more symptom of that "freethinking" country that falls for every con.
We had an office worker who became obsessed about dehydrating, undoubtedly after watching too much social media. She carried the bottle everywhere.
She arrived at work one day in a state of panic because her water bottle spilt in the car and she was terrified of becoming dehydrated during her 15 minute commute.
And no, there wasn't anything medically wrong with her.
My theory is that the water obsession, protein obsession, "micro-exercise" fads like weighted vests and a lot of other similar trends are primarily just all about appetite control and "hacking" weight loss.
not the OP but: it's fairly obvious that those office workers force themselves, so you can't say "as much as they please", otherwise they d stop 3 liters earlier. So yes, you will be judged.
It's actually a song title, so properly capitalized, but I mussed the V v. W because I do not speak German and forgot that when she sings "VASSuh", it's spelled with a W. :)
Ok, as a German, I think we just don't care about the distinction. We only have the two letters/sounds W and F, the first representing various sounds between [w] and [v]. I think it isn't even a dialect thing, i.e. it is more like unspecified behaviour not like implementation-defined, it can change by time-of-day by a single person, because we just don't care. The letter V can represent either the German W or F sound, I think you just need to know that for every word.
In all offices I worked in, less than 10% had their own water bottle. The others barely drank 2 cups per day. They go to the toilet at most twice per workday.
People have this weird idea that you must drink a certain amount of fluid per day or be reminded to drink every so often. Like no, if you need water, you will be thirsty. If you feel the need to drink then drink, it’s not complicated.
Well clearly it is complicated as this comment thread shows. Many people don't feel thirst because of age or other reasons or confuse thirst with hunger.
When I am in the heat, I do not feel thirst. I skip straight to heat exhaustion. I need to make a conscious effort to keep hydrated when I'm outside during the hot months.
I'm so interested in this topic, for a weird reason.
Since I was a kid, I've thought I was "prone to migraines", and ascribed various triggers to them - sun exposure, heat, physical exertion, mental exertion, etc. I'd get a migraine sometimes after a long hike on a weekend - and also a long business meeting entirely indoors in an air-conditioned space.
Only when I was around 35, did I figure something out. All these situations lead to me getting dehydrated without any obvious accompanying feeling of thirst. Hiking all day will do it - walking around an outdoor shopping mall on a hot afternoon - or sitting in an all-day business meeting focused on the work at hand and forgetting to drink. And all these situations lead to a migraine - my only "migraine" trigger is simple dehydration, nothing more complicated.
The weird thing is, it took me a long time (decades) to put this together, because I just figured that I couldn't be dehydrated if I wasn't thirsty, and I had no association between "feeling thirsty" and getting a migraine.
I get what I consider normally thirsty in other circumstances, but somehow there's a failure mode where my body doesn't warn me. So now I just remember to chug lots of water (and electrolytes) if I'm exerting myself even if I don't really feel thirsty, and I can systematically avoid triggering migraines.
Now that I understand it the association is quite clear and obvious in retrospect.
A quick note for people responding, you might have a mild form of vascular dysregulation or flammer's syndrome. It can manifest as migraines and a decreased sensation of thirst, as well as other symptoms like cold extremities.
Afaik it's pretty harmless in general but it is associated with certain vision issues (normal tension glaucoma). Glaucoma is irreversible but has many treatment options especially if caught early. But you MUST go in for a (fast, cheap, painless) screening to catch it, it's really hard to detect unless there are issues otherwise. Please consider this if you really are showing a lot of these symptoms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flammer_syndrome
How interesting!
I have had mild tinnitus my whole life (with no obvious lifestyle cause), and my migraines do often manifest as pain / pressure behind the eyelid. But I don't have any of the myriad other symptoms listed for Flammer syndrome - I sleep fine, my blood pressure is fine, I'm pretty solidly built (not underweight), I don't get cold easily, etc.
It is interesting to consider I might some sort of related disorder, though!
I would still consider the glaucoma check. I don't think that you can even necessarily get a Flammer syndrome diagnosis, it's not a disease afaik, just a pattern.
Glaucoma is the condition that matters and if you don't run the (fast, cheap, painless) check you can miss a serious issue.
If the risk is normal-tension glaucoma, then simply measuring ocular pressures isn't going to be valuable. What test are you thinking of?
I used to have warm and sweaty hands. Since I picked up bouldering I realised everyone is using chalk but I hardly sweat in my hands (I still sweat). My hands felt colder, and I don’t feel thirsty that if I don’t drink enough water it triggers headache. Took me quite some time to associate the headache with dehydration. Thanks for the reply. I will try to get myself a check up
Just get the glaucoma check (I don't think that you can even necessarily get a Flammer syndrome diagnosis, it's not a disease). That's the condition that matters and if you don't run a formal (fast, cheap, painless) check you can miss a serious issue.
I just remember reading that adults start to lose their ability to sense thirst.
Wikipedia says 50:
In adults over the age of 50 years, the body's thirst sensation reduces and continues diminishing with age, putting this population at increased risk of dehydration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirst#Elderly
It's a big problem for the elderlies, it snowballs into serious issues. Don't feel thirst -> be dehydrated -> UTI -> hospital.
And having to be stay at a hospital for a length of time for any reason is very much Not Good for an elderly person. Other illnesses, muscle atrophy, disorientation, loneliness, cognitive decline...
You are correct.
Hospital -> Social home, then what you have said ... and then death.
As someone who has a relative working in a hospital and another in a social home (for the elderly, but these days we get 50 years olds with dementia which is crazy), they experience it.
It is not necessarily about dehydration, but that plays a huge role, too. Sometimes a simple yet unfortunate fall is enough.
I'm 56 now and I'd agree. I bike in the summer for exercise and I drink while on the go as needed. I always got a headache after exercising. A regular headache not a migraine (never had one).
My discovery was Pedialyte it's meant for children but it's like the adult version or Gatorade. I drink it before I exercise and also drink as needed. I feel normal no headaches not dehydrated.
edit: I also have hypothyroidism so my hypothalamus must also be crap at regulating my thirst maybe?
If my mum wasn't English she would have shrivelled and died of dehydration many years ago. There's a lot of water in 15 daily cups of tea.
Tangential: I remember when I was a kid, adults always told me to drink more. Apparently I never drank enough, but I don't think it's ever caused me any problems. As an adult, I started drinking a lot of water - I drink easily 4 liters a day. Not even sure why. And now I always tell my kid to hydrate...
> As an adult, I started drinking a lot of water - I drink easily 4 liters a day. Not even sure why.
Excessive thirst and urination is a potential symptom of diabetes, might want to get that checked out.
I remember the same. As I approach 50, I do notice that I feel much more tired and mentally foggy when I fail to remember my daily water bottles. I've had to develop specific routines that help me remember to fill/drink my water bottle which goes pretty much everywhere with me. For being such a necessity, it sure is an oddly hard thing to remember to do.
I think adults tell kid-me to drink more water was a way of trying to get me to just develop a habit with it, since they understood the seemingly paradoxical struggle of keeping hydrated at their age.
I had a similar moment of enlightenment when I found out that depressive feelings can be caused by a lack of sleep.
This 1000x. Anytime I get depressed my first response now is I need more sleep. Not to say that this is the answer for everyone, but yeah, I've noticed the same thing.
I have a friend who recommends getting good sleep as the first step in solving any problem.
It is pretty nearly true.
Except for those who can't get good sleep (or even average sleep).
You might as well be my dream self writing a journal, because this describes my experience 1:1. It's kindof wild how long it took me to realize that I wasn't overheating at night due to the weather or the A/C being broken, but simply due to needing more water. That's one of my strongest signs as it turns out.
I don't know what "thirst" feels like at all! It's weird because I do feel hunger. If I forget to actually eat, my stomach kicks my brain and refuses to let me concentrate until I fix it. Hydration has no equivalent, and in retrospect, it's no wonder I was suffering headaches and nausea all through college on my diet of mostly soda. After I switched to water as my primary beverage things improved dramatically, but it's not perfect. I still have to watch the signs and pay attention, or I'll dehydrate myself by simply forgetting to drink.
> I don't know what "thirst" feels like at all! It's weird because I do feel hunger.
(I'm not an expert so take with a grain of salt)
This is it! Your hunger! It's actually thirst! When you're "hungry", try drinking a glass of water first. (Some people use this trick to lose weight, others, to stay hydrated...)
This was a very important realization for me. That many times when I felt small cravings, the main thing I needed was not something sweet but water. Before I would drink milk, lemonade etc. But now I just drink water. Helped to regulate blood sugar better during the day.
> I just figured that I couldn't be dehydrated if I wasn't thirsty
This is what I learned, but from others online. I also learned that sometimes our body/mind may mistake thirst for hunger and we may end up eating some food instead of just drinking water (this is generalizing things a bit). This made me a little more aware of what I think of as hunger signals and I started tracking water intake (other than from food) everyday.
BTW, a tiny nitpick: it’s “led”, not “lead”, when you talking about the past.
As a stickler for spelling myself, I had to go back and check. I meant that sentence in the present tense as these situations continue to occur.
I grew up in a hot climate spending a lot of time outdoors, and I was educated about staying hydrated from a young age.
Still, like you, when I get symptoms of dehydration, I don't feel any intuitive connection with the need to drink, and I often don't feel any urge to drink at all. I have to remind myself to drink even though I don't want to.
It's weird. You'd think something so essential for life would have a better regulator.
Notice peeing. That’s my hack. It can be used as a dehydration monitor, not just frequency and volume but color especially is informative.
The US military drilled it into my head during boot camp in Texas in the late summer - pay attention to the color.
In activities prone to heatstroke, the advice is similar. Even for people with normal thirst detection capabilities, by the time that you realize you're thirsty it's likely too late. You need to be proactive about drinking enough water.
I can't relate more. I am also prone to ophthalmic migraines and have the same tendency to not be thirsty, to the amazement of the people I usually trek or live with. Only recently (35 and a kidney stone) did I gather that I might actually be in need of water even without feelings of thirst. I have never made a connection with migraines, and that might not be it for me but reading you makes me want to pay attention.
Hah, same. I recently started getting many more back to back meetings than usual and, by lunchtime, I had a headache most days. It took me a while to realize that, while I’m at my desk, I keep drinking from the huge water bottle that I keep there, but when I go to meetings, I don’t. I started carrying the bottle with me (when I remember) and the headaches are gone.
Same here - there are other feelings than a dry mouth or "feeling thirsty" that tell me I need more water. The slight beginning of a headache for example, or feeling a little bit dizzy, or many other things. I guess I could call these "feeling thirsty" since I now know when I feel these things that I probably need water and that's how I interpret them.
In my late 40's I realized I don't get thirsty. I did when I was younger.
I'm also a big sweater so I dehydrate quickly.
I found that I would get dehydrated to the point where my body tissues would reduce in volume or something and my Eustachian tubes would open up. They would either pop as I breathed or actually transmit my breath sounds directly into my ear from my throat. Concerning, yes.
Soon after drinking a lot of water this would go away. I soon realized that I was lacking a sense of thirst and was really stressing my body. Now I make drinking a habit.
I also discovered that dehydration was a migraine trigger for me. I tend not to get big headaches now but get quite intense visual aura / disturbance.
Interestingly I also discovered that electrolyte supplements were also migraine triggers for me.
Leading me to think that electrolyte imbalance was the actually trigger. Caused by too little water increasing the concentration or added salts increasing it.
I tend not to feel thirst very strongly and think I do often confuse it with hunger.
I pay loose attention to urine colour as a gauge and make sure I drink plenty, kinda robotically when playing sports / walking in heat etc.
When somebody complains about headaches, the first think my family does, and so now do I, is to ask whether you have drank enough. I thought this is common knowledge.
Next things are: sleep, sugar, stress.
When I was in my 20s I realized I had lost the thirst signal. I never felt thirsty. I guessed this was because I lived a comfortable life and I had lost this signal in the noise of modern life.
So I set about deliberately retraining myself. I stopped drinking everything but water (and beer, because life) I'd exercise (and sweat) and then drink water. I retrained my body/mind to savour the pleasantness of drinking water when dehydrated and after a year of conscious effort I more or less recovered the sense of "thirst" and would pre-emptively desire drinking water.
We are pretty simple machines.
Maybe a related point is that hangovers, of which headaches are likely the most common symptom, are caused in a large part by dehydration as well as electrolyte imbalance.
A friend of mine always goes around parties and tells everyone to stay hydrated. It always feels completely out of place, and also it's saved me from many hangovers...
I'm probably misunderstanding the article or you, but as I understand it you are talking about different things.
The article talks about the proportions between water and sodium, while you are talking about just filling up the tank with both.
I too drink water with sodium (and a few other salts) to relieve oncoming migraines but this has to be something else than the article is talking about.
Nvm, sitting with it for a bit I realise that when I drink salty water and it relieves my migraine my body needs either salts or water and by giving it both it takes what it needs and gets rid of the other.
There are simple indicators that can tell you how hydrated you are.
1) When did you last urinate, and was it a light or deep colour?
2) Can you make saliva easily in your mouth, or does your tongue rasp around?
That and "Have I had any water yet this morning / afternoon" keeps me hydrated.
It took me to teenagehood and then finally around the same time did I link it togtether.
Glad to know I'm not the only one and I do wonder how I missed this obvious step. Lately I've been doing electrolytes/water cliche of pocari sweat/etc and it really helps focus, weight, energy, etc.
> I just figured that I couldn't be dehydrated if I wasn't thirsty
When did you last pee and what color?
15 years ago, blue.
I used to work for an industrial company that had a lot of plants which, by the nature of the work they did, were often extremely hot - a lot of them had urine colour charts in the toilets to try and warn people about dehydration.
I think I have the same problem. I'm ever dehydrated now, but if I am I can tell something is wrong because my head starts to feel fuzzy (don't even know if it's the right word).
I used to get really bad migraines and a neurologist gave me a prescription. The only time I used it I felt like absolute shit. Never took another one.
Now I always have my 700ml flask with me.
YES YES i get migraines and it's my body saying "Hey you need more water to function you know ?" usually i don't feel any thirst nor hunger, although, i do get hungry more often, but i can last a day without food before my head starts to hurt
[dead]
"However, animals like us do not experience salt desire as a powerful, controlling drive as we do with oxygen, food and water." (from the article).
I disagree with that, especially when I was young. I would crave salt. I would lick my hand and sprinkle salt on it, then lick the salt off. I would break chunks off the salt lick block we had for our horses. I would lick the homemade play-doh my mom would make because it tasted like salt.
There's no substantiation for the claim in the article that we lack a salt craving. Apparently, the author hasn't, but I know a lot of people that do.
Breaking and hauling concrete patios in the Florida sunshine, I learned to take a couple of salt tablets with my gallon or two of water per shift to prevent incapacitating symptoms of thirst. Gatorade was both not enough electrolytes and the sugar spike too quickly dissipated. On the flipside, distilled water strips excess ions.
Same here. On recent Indian trips, I got hit with mild nausea after sweating in summer weather. I couldn't believe I wasn't able to go around like I used to few years ago. Had to bring along mildly salted water and take couple of sips now and then.
I am piloting a super sophisticated mech that is a literal home (primordial soup) for other tiny specs that cooperate together.
And more and more I ask this question. Why? There is only recursive answer, to copy itself, so the copy could continue piloting.
It is poetic and really weird.
I am "fastened to a dying animal", at least you're proud of your fancy mech.
They should make an anime series about that.
They could call it "Diffusion Dave", or maybe "Jobs for Cells"
I recently learned that the inverse of thirst is called hyponatremic craving. This is when you have too much water and your body craves salt.
It ought to have a better word! “I’m feeling salty” doesn’t work!
That was one part of the article I found questionable- "If the body needs salt, those chips will cause a surge of pleasurable dopamine to flood the brain. If the body doesn’t need salt, that dopamine drip disappears"
Surely this second part is false? Most of us have got used to high levels of salt in modern diets, and prefer the taste of salty things even when we've had way more sodium than we need.
I have the opposite problem, after one glass of water I feel full and drinking any more makes me nauseous. It’s a struggle to get sufficient hydration during the day.
Try adding a rehydrating powder mix, the same stuff they use for treating diarrhoea. It’s just salts, glucose, and citric acid. It is hugely more hydrating than plain water, with a much faster onset of feeling relief from intense thirst.
Sports drinks are basically the same thing, but with excess sugars for “energy” (and weight gain).
[dead]
First off, it doesn’t have to be plain water. Secondly, the two liters a day was two liters of moisture, not drinking two liters a day; food is included in this amount
> food is included in this amount
When my wife was ill a few years ago the doctor suggested Angel Delight[1] to help maintain fluids. Until then it hadn't occurred to me you're still effectively drinking half a pint of milk when you eat a bowl.
[1] It's an instant dessert / mousse that you mix up with milk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_Delight
What are your thoughts on cows milk? There are a number of studies suggesting it’s better at hydration than plain water regardless of skim vs. whole.
I own a dairy cow and milk twice a day. I drink a lot of milk. For me, it’s definitely not as good for hydration. And unless you skim it thoroughly (yuck!), it contains an obscene number of calories. It’s not a great substitute for water, but it tastes far better.
Don't drink the whole glass at once?
try carbonated water +/- lemon juice
A good choice if you have a carbonating machine; just take care of your teeth afterwards, especially if you add lemon juice.
You gotta clarify what "take care of your teeth afterwards" means, because brushing your teeth after eating lemons is the worst thing you can do. Best thing is to do absolutely nothing.
Rinse with plenty of water.
How many ounces consumed over how many minutes?
Tangentially related, I'm curious to know why it is that proteins are so much more filling than other macronutrients (within minutes)
One theory is that the most important nutrient that we really need a certain amount of every day is protein, and thus the body wants us to keep eating until it thinks we've got enough protein. (And for the vegans, I'm not saying meat - even most green plants and mushrooms are about 1/3 protein by dry weight). In nature almost every food has some amount of protein. If you get meat, you don't need to eat that much for your body to have all the protein it needs. If you are eating cake, it will take an awful lot of cake to have an adequate amount of protein.
In evolutionary past, if one had access to fresh fruit it might make sense to eat a lot of it right away since it won't keep, and the sugar in the fruit is easy for the body to store as fat and use later. In nature it's very rare to find a diet with very high fat and low protein but suppose you live by a macadamia tree, you may need to eat a lot of calories worth of macadamias to get enough protein. I have a feeling though that excess fat can go right through you in some cases like that - because there have been times where I was binging on peanut butter, like easily 16-24oz in a day often, like 2-3000 calories extra on top of my normal diet, and I didn't gain weight, I think a lot of it went through me undigested.
These are just hypotheses I'm not claiming they are necessarily the reason, and definitely are not the only mechanism involved as it's extremely complex. But they make sense as a simple place to start.
>I have a feeling though that excess fat can go right through you in some cases like that - because there have been times where I was binging on peanut butter, like easily 16-24oz in a day often, like 2-3000 calories extra on top of my normal diet, and I didn't gain weight, I think a lot of it went through me undigested.
Nuts, specifically, do this:
https://www.nature.com/articles/0803735
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-n...
Peanut butter is usually pretty bioavailable, though. Unless it was particularly coarse (like the kind you get freshly made at an upscale grocer)?
Yeah I know chunks of nut can get through undigested but in this case it was creamy peanut butter, "natural" but not crunchy. I wonder if it may have been because of the quantity, that the body was like "nope we don't need all that" or what.
I meant how does the body know I'm eating protein so quickly (almost real-time)
I thought this was because the protein can (partially) neutralize stomach acid. Proteins contain an amino group which can be protonated; carbohydrates and fats do not.
This article reminded me to go drink water, I had forgotten.
i can't stop eating the salt cristals before eating the lunch
∑ Quanta Thirst
[dead]
So dumb to see office workers sipping all day on their gallon water bottles, while outside the workers in the sun on the construction site taking the occasional sip.
Back when I worked in heavy construction (aka, trench digging for telcos) I went through about six liters of soda a day when it was hot outside. And no, I was not diabetic, I was just very intensively working out!
The problem is, too many people in construction don't give a shit about their bodies. Corporate greed, incompetent/uncaring bosses, toxic masculinity, plain old incompetence and/or people "set in their ways"... these are the guys you see at age 50 with their spines shot, skin crumbling (or outright cancering out) and a plethora of health issues.
> So dumb to see office workers sipping all day on their gallon water bottles, while outside the workers in the sun on the construction site taking the occasional sip.
Dumb? People can't just drink their darn water as much as they please without getting judged now? What's your point?
It is still weird to see the health fad/moral panic/potomania in the US, about "drinking enough water". This is a borderline mania, that doesn't exist in other countries- including ones with hot climates.
https://www.menshealth.com/health/a60249105/how-much-water-t...
https://www.thrillist.com/drink/nation/do-americans-drink-mo...
https://www.delicious.com.au/drinks/article/why-we-so-obsess...
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/Wellness/waterlogged-america-d...
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/08/drinking-...
https://archive.ph/Y0W7e
No, you are not "chronically dehydrated". The rest of the world isn't, and you wouldn't be either if you drank "only" two liters a day instead of a full gallon.
This is one more symptom of that "freethinking" country that falls for every con.
We had an office worker who became obsessed about dehydrating, undoubtedly after watching too much social media. She carried the bottle everywhere.
She arrived at work one day in a state of panic because her water bottle spilt in the car and she was terrified of becoming dehydrated during her 15 minute commute.
And no, there wasn't anything medically wrong with her.
> And no, there wasn't anything medically wrong with her.
Do you mean physically? The behavior surely sounds compulsive...
It might come across that way, but the way hydration is talked about on social media makes that level of fear a completely reasonable response.
Self-trained mental illness is still mental illness.
My theory is that the water obsession, protein obsession, "micro-exercise" fads like weighted vests and a lot of other similar trends are primarily just all about appetite control and "hacking" weight loss.
I think it is more a comment about the insane size some of those beverage containers grew to over the years.
Some of them do indeed look like you could take a bath in them.
Then again, maybe their colleagues are using those as stealth biceps curl weights and are actually secret gym rats trapped at a desk.
not the OP but: it's fairly obvious that those office workers force themselves, so you can't say "as much as they please", otherwise they d stop 3 liters earlier. So yes, you will be judged.
It looks pretty dumb.
Why are you monitoring your colleagues’ water intake?
because he s in front of me and i have eyes ?
Perhaps he has a renal function issue.
Perhaps he has a familial history of same and is acclimated to drinking more water than you are comfortable with.
Perhaps he just enjoys drinking water. I do. As cold as possible. Kaltes Klares Vasser.
Regardless, ain't none o' yr dang bidness.
> Kaltes Klares Vasser
If that was supposed to be German for "cold clear water" that's "kaltes klares Wasser" and we don't capitalize adjectives.
It's actually a song title, so properly capitalized, but I mussed the V v. W because I do not speak German and forgot that when she sings "VASSuh", it's spelled with a W. :)
To me the pronunciation of the first letter of the English word water and the German word Wasser sounds the same, but maybe my English is wrong.
Apparently it varies, but German-W pronounced as English-V (or at least nearly so) is the most common variation?
Many sources on the net, but this one has the most nuanced discussion that I could find:
https://old.reddit.com/r/German/comments/53ws8q/are_ws_alway...
Ok, as a German, I think we just don't care about the distinction. We only have the two letters/sounds W and F, the first representing various sounds between [w] and [v]. I think it isn't even a dialect thing, i.e. it is more like unspecified behaviour not like implementation-defined, it can change by time-of-day by a single person, because we just don't care. The letter V can represent either the German W or F sound, I think you just need to know that for every word.
Cold Clear Vater
Hah, quite.
I only cosplay Deutscher Sprecher.
Most of my German linguistic skills come from listening to Chicks on Speed.
I drink water throughout the day and I most certainly don’t force myself. The fuck are you talking about?!
I'm sure he also goes to strangers in bars who don't order manly drinks and informs them they are not heterosexuals.
In all offices I worked in, less than 10% had their own water bottle. The others barely drank 2 cups per day. They go to the toilet at most twice per workday.
Baffling.
I see blue collar workers carrying big hydroflasks all the time, I'm guessing they drink even more water.
How is that dumb? It could be that the construction workers are in fact dehydrated if that's the case
In my experience construction site workers have even larger jugs of water to drink.
People have this weird idea that you must drink a certain amount of fluid per day or be reminded to drink every so often. Like no, if you need water, you will be thirsty. If you feel the need to drink then drink, it’s not complicated.
Well clearly it is complicated as this comment thread shows. Many people don't feel thirst because of age or other reasons or confuse thirst with hunger.
When I am in the heat, I do not feel thirst. I skip straight to heat exhaustion. I need to make a conscious effort to keep hydrated when I'm outside during the hot months.