The Quest for Hydration
Tracking when, how, and why I drink fluids in a weekend.
My childhood tennis coach nicknamed me “camel” because I’d play for hours without drinking a drop of water. Not much as changed since then — I wake up with a dry throat on the daily (then momentarily believe I’ve finally contracted COVID) and my lips have never been more chapped.
So over the weekend, I decided to track my hydration habits.
Apparently, besides promoting regular body functions, being well-hydrated also improves sleep quality, cognition, and mood. I’m ready to kick my non-hydration habit and gain an upper hand on the sleep deprivation and seasonal mood swings that’ve been afflicting me these past 6 months.
📝 Tracking Fluids Intake
The method
Drinking water is a task we perform almost subconsciously — to ensure that I don’t miss any important “hydration” moments, I decided it was best to check in at regular 30-minute intervals. I tracked three key pieces of information for each entry in the log:
- Date and time of log
- In-moment notes on the context of my liquid consumption
- Water volume (in oz) consumed throughout the day up to that point
Method reflections
- Acknowledging observer’s bias By choosing to track total water consumed throughout the day, I’ve essentially set up a virtual alarm that goes off every 30 minutes showing me my progress so far and reminding me to keep drinking fluids. This introduced observer’s bias into my study — honestly, I’d never drink this much water on a normal weekend. If I were to redo this experiment, I’d try tracking water drank within a certain interval instead of as a % function of an overall goal so as the reduce the goal gradient effect.
- Helpfulness of contextual information The “What I’m Doing” column included not just physical-context logs but commentary of exactly what I was thinking or feeling at each timestamp. This allowed me to capture my exact motivation for drinking or not drinking fluids and how fast or often I’d drink, which allowed me to easily map patterns onto habit models later on.
🧬 The Anatomy of Thirst
Connection Circle
The following connection circle models interactions between the many triggers I noticed for (not) drinking fluids. I used blue lines to denote (+) increase and red lines to denote (-) decrease in a certain attribute or behavior.
💡 Illuminating Insights
Drinking fast is detrimental in my end goal of drinking lots
Tasty fluids encourage well-paced hydration — but it’s harder to refill it so isn’t a foolproof solution
The bladder is my enemy — repeated trips to the restroom made me not want to continue drinking water, but preoccupation dulled that effect by decreasing the feeling of disruption by those repeated trip
Large bottles always help me drink more regardless of other factors
Being in bed ruins everything hydration-related
Fishbone Diagram
I elected to draw a fishbone diagram as my second model. Like a connection circle, it helped map the possible causal factors in the habit ecosystem, but organizes triggers by type so it’s easier to look at it and make sense of potential habit-kicking strategies.
💡 Illuminating Insights
There are many ways i can change my environment to set myself up for success.
I can reduce access difficulty and high cost to drinks that intrinsically motivate me to hydrate (i.e. through DIY or bulk solutions)
It’s important to regulate drinking pace to reduce bathroom use because that ultimately undermines by willingness to stay regularly hydrated
🍵 Applying the Learned Hacks
Doing this activity actually made me feel much more confident in my ability to change my life around. Here’s why:
- The tracker showed that as long as I remember to, I actually love drinking liquids. I’d managed to exceeded my daily goal of 64oz for both days.
- The habit models showed me what factors were my control. I recognized that I can easily make adjustments to my external environment to remove myself from my most “vulnerable” non-hydration states, and I plan to test them out –
Have a big bottle always within arm’s reach and staying out of bed are the easiest steps
Set up my workspace closer to water refill stations and the restroom
DIY or stock up on “interesting” drinks to take advantage of intrinsic motivation while reducing the costs of balanced hydration
- In a meta-way, the behavior tracking also convinced me how effective progress-based reminders are in motivating rehydration. I will continue consistently using a 24-oz bottle for fluids so it’s easy to mentally track intake throughout the day.
