Dehydration could be very dangerous, as it affects all life-sustaining functions of your body, including the thermoregulatory, cardiovascular, metabolic, and central nervous systems.
By drinking more water every day, you can avoid dehydration with all its accompanying issues and improve your quality of life. Let’s look at 6 science-based ways how staying hydrated boosts your health and wellbeing.
1) Improves brain function
Drinking enough water supports the proper functioning of your brain and helps keep your mood stable.
For different people, even mild dehydration can cause different problems with cognitive performance and mental state. Some common effects include problems with short-term memory, alertness, concentration, and psychomotor skills.
For example, one research found that women can experience an increased perception of task difficulty, problems with mood, lower concentration, and headache symptoms because of mild dehydration. Another study found that for the same reason, men can experience fatigue, anxiety, and problems with working memory.
2) Boosts physical performance
Proper hydration doesn’t only support your cognitive function; it helps with your physical performance too.
When you’re dehydrated, your endurance and motivation decrease, while the amount of effort you need to make during physical activity increases. For example, this study shows that the physical performance during endurance exercise starts to suffer when dehydration exceeds 2% of body weight.
By drinking enough water, you will feel more energy and motivation during physical activity and will be able to perform at your peak level.
3) Increases metabolism
Giving you energy boosts so that you work out at your peak performance is not the only way how water helps you get your dream body. Drinking enough water can also increase your metabolism and help you lose weight.
Research demonstrates that drinking 500 ml of lukewarm water can increase the metabolic rate by 30% in healthy adults. The body starts reacting just 10 minutes after you’ve drunk those 500 ml and reaches the maximum effect in 30-40 minutes.
4) Supports heart health
Aside from enjoying the immediate positive effects of drinking water, you can support your future health by staying hydrated every day.
Consistently drinking enough water helps keep your heart healthy and can reduce the risk of heart failure in the future, according to this new research.
Turns out, dehydration can increase your serum sodium concentration and lead to the thickening of your heart's main pumping chamber walls. And if you constantly take less fluid than your body needs in your midlife, those issues can end up causing left ventricular hypertrophy and heart failure 25 years later.
5) Supports skin hydration
While it’s still not confirmed by research whether you can significantly improve the appearance of your skin by drinking more water, you can definitely achieve some positive results by supporting the proper hydration level of your skin.
For example, this study demonstrated that by drinking around 2 liters of water every day, you can positively affect skin physiology and significantly improve both superficial and deep skin hydration. You will notice an even bigger difference if you were dehydrated before making this new healthy habit.
6) Supports kidney function
Your kidneys work hard to help your body get rid of waste and toxins, and you can support their proper function by drinking more water.
Research shows that higher fluid intake can protect against chronic kidney disease. The study suggests that by increasing the amount of fluid we intake, we can prevent this disease that can potentially lead to life-threatening kidney failure.
Besides, if you drink enough water, you can reduce the risk of getting kidney stones in the first place, and prevent recurrent kidney stones too.
