What does it mean to be thirsty?

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Now I always have my 700ml flask with me.

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.

> I just figured that I couldn't be dehydrated if I wasn't thirsty

When did you last pee and what color?

> 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 had a similar moment of enlightenment when I found out that depressive feelings can be caused by a lack of sleep.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

They should make an anime series about that.

I am "fastened to a dying animal", at least you're proud of your fancy mech.

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.

How many ounces consumed over how many minutes?

Don't drink the whole glass at once?

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).

try carbonated water +/- lemon juice

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.

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

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 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.

Dumb? People can't just drink their darn water as much as they please without getting judged now? What's your point?

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.

I see blue collar workers carrying big hydroflasks all the time, I'm guessing they drink even more water.

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.

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.

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.