If you are an insomniac, chances are you are reading this in the middle of the night, desperately trying to find something online that will help you to get a good night’s sleep. The answer might actually be a lot simpler than you think – could a few extra glasses of water throughout the day really cure your inability to sleep?
Diagnosing Dehydration
Maintaining adequate hydration is a full-time job. Sipping water at regular intervals throughout the day is essential for a lot of bodily systems, including the elimination of toxins. If you are not getting enough water into your body, it has to work harder to get rid of the negative elements in your blood stream. This can leave you feeling fatigued, which most would assume to be the magic ingredient to a good nights’ sleep. As you have probably already realised, however, tiredness is not a guarantee of a restful night.
The first place you will notice the effects of dehydration is in the skin. If you start finding that your skin is dryer than usual, you have acne or your skin is looking particularly grey and dull, it is possible that you are suffering a lack of hydration. Then you might get a headache, due to lack of water around the brain and you’ll almost certainly be passing urine that is dark in colour.
Your natural body rhythm relies on a constant source of water. Without it, you will find it difficult to sleep at night, despite feeling exhausted all day.
Curing Dehydration
It really should be as simple as drinking more water, shouldn’t it? While this is certainly the biggest thing you can do to improve your overall health and aid your hydration levels, there are other factors to consider too.
For example, what else are you drinking? As an insomniac, it is likely that you are turning to various other sources of energy to keep you going throughout the day. Tea, coffee, energy drinks and other caffeinated drinks give you a short-term boost that enable you to get on with your day-to-day activities. However, they also deplete your hydration levels and leave you with an energy slump that exacerbates your problem – particularly if the cycle is repeated over a long time. Caffeine stays in your system for around six to eight hours, so if you are drinking a cup of coffee at 3pm, in order to beat the mid-afternoon crash, chances are that it will continue to interfere with your sleep patterns at 10-11pm.
Another thing to consider is the foods you are consuming. Drinking more water is great, but if you suddenly increase the amount you are drinking, you may inadvertently flush out other essential nutrients in the body. For this reason, it is important to eat lots of whole, healthy foods at the same time, in order to maintain your nutrients.
Insomnia can be caused by any number of factors, but proper hydration helps to keep you healthy and your body working as it should, so that you can sleep easy at night.
