You know how there’s a million tips and tricks out there about how to drink more water? Like, add lemon! Drink a glass immediately when you wake up! Download this app! But still, we have SUCH a hard time building this habit! So, I’m going to add to the list of tricks and give you one that I’ve never heard anyone mention before…
Figure out how you like to drink your water.
Pay attention when you’re offered water, whether you accept it or refuse it. When you accept it, do you drink it? When you drink it, do you like it? What do you like about it? Are you feeling a bit existential about your water drinking now? Good.
For reference, here’s my list of likes and dislikes:
- I like my water room temp. A lot of people are weirded out by this, but it’s how I like most of my drinks. No ice please!
- I don’t like water out of a normal sized straw. I have an abnormally large straw in my bedside water bottle (I’ll show you in the next section).
- If I have to, I will drink out of a glass, but the smaller the glass, the better.
- I like large-mouth bottles, I don’t like suction ones.
With this knowledge of what I do and don’t like, I’ve come up with the perfect (for me!) set of drinking vessels. I believe the drinking vessel is super important in our water consumption habits. I have no science to back this up, simply my own experiments. Here’s what I use:
I like these because they all fit my criteria. I find myself drinking super quickly out of the large mason jar straw. When I’m at work, a little trick I’ve found is that if I keep the lid off of the bkr, I am constantly drinking because I don’t have to think about it. The on-the-go option was the hardest to find. Mostly because I struggled with finding something that was decent looking and lightweight. But I found it! And it works!
I also like that they’re larger sizes, because rather than filling something up a zillion times, I only have to fill the mason jar and bkr 3 times to hit my daily goal (96 oz!), or 4 times with the Contigo. It’s easy then to break it into morning/noon/night servings. And when I’ve reached my goal, I give myself a little checkmark in my self-care tracker! Another game I play with myself is, at work I don’t let myself have a mid-morning snack between breakfast and lunch until I finish my first liter. That way it helps me manage my snacking habit as well.
What do you think? Doable? I’d love to hear how you manage your water intake, too! Let me know!