Water

Did you know? For males aged >18yo, in Europe, the recommended water intake is 2.5L while in the USA, it’s 4.0L.

Some backstory

I’ve had poor health since forever. I would wake up with a terrible headache and feel terrible all day long.

This invariably caused me tremendous headaches; relationships problems because it’s hard to focus on someone else when you feel bad; work problems because it makes me unproductive; (spoiler: it also makes me sleep more)

Well… I’m going to drink a lot tonight

So one night, just before sleeping, I was going to sleep and like usual, my vision field looked weird. It’s like the lines are drifting, it’s hard to explain. I thought to myself: it’s like my eyes need to drink. So, that night, I decided: “fuck it, I’m going to drink until I can’t no more tonight”

So that’s what I did; I just drank and drank and drank… and peed and peed and peed…

I kept peeing, but I kept drinking.

The result: the best night of sleep I had in a loooong time.

What’s happening

I think that I just have been chronically dehydrated for the past (my age) years and that it has caused me a lot of issues.

Retaining water seems to be a problem as well to me, because I keep peeing. Or maybe I just have diabetes, so I pee a lot, ergo I’m dehydrated.

Well, my point is: I really need to drink more

How much should I drink?

Problem with the technique of “just drinking until I can’t no more” is that I pee too much and that it’s causing me problems in the day to day life.

Apparently, the body has a limit of how much it can absorb over a given period of time, so it’s better to sip water throughout the day rather than drinking a big bottle every 5 hours.

Problem is that I’m often outside to a cafe shop or something, and I don’t think that it’s practical to bring 2 big bottles of water all the time with me. I need to know how much I need for a given amount of time.

Here are the standards, if you forgot:

(for a male > 18yo)

So, I did a little experiment to see who’s right.

Here are the results:

What I was doing was drinking about 500mL every hour. The theory was that I would stay awake > 8 hours so I would reach the 4.0L

Actually, now that I think of it, I stayed awake way longer than that, so I must have drank more…

… okay, I think I’ll update this blog post later with more precise measurements.

Effect on sleep

When I drink too much water, or not in an efficient way (e.g. big amounts instead of sipping throughout the hour), I end up peeing very often and that wakes me up.

(It is worth noting that it’s also problematic when working at a cafe on my laptop, since it interrupts my work and makes me that weird guy that goes to the toilet every 30 minutes or less)

The solution for this is to drink 250mL every 30 minutes instead.

Other than that, sleep is shorter, but way more refreshing.

When I wake up, I feel happy and energized, while in the past, waking up meant suffering.

My skin also feels better after a night of sleep after a day where I drank a lot.

The tricky thing: drinking is annoying, and you only get the effects until the next day.

Conclusion

If you have troubles with sleep not being refreshing, maybe try being a bit more hardcore with water :)