Is “Staying Hydrated” Messing with Your Body?
Stay hydrated. I don’t drink enough water. I need to drink more water. I’m not drinking enough water. These are statements we may hear all day long, and ones which may be running through our head all day long. We are bombarded with the message from doctors, family members, and our internal monologue alike so constantly that it seems almost like a priori wisdom that the more water we drink, the better. And that we can almost never be drinking enough water.
The short answer to the title question is, no, staying hydrated is not messing with your body. The answer is no, as we all know, because cell life requires having water inside of them. Water is the medium by which cells transport nutrients including sugar, minerals, and vitamins, from cell to cell.
The long answer to the question will comprise the rest of this piece. Is staying hydrated, in quotes, messing with your body? It might very well be. The obsession with hydration (which in and of itself is of course fundamentally important) sometimes translates into an endless pursuit to drink more and more water, regardless of whether we are thirsty or not.
Drinking so much water, way more than we need, may be creating fluid stagnation or dampness in our body. It’s conventionally thought, just basically drink as much water as you can, the body will just pee out the excess. Theoretically this is true. But what if the body’s fluid metabolism is not functioning optimally, which is almost always the case because we are human and our body is not always at its optimal. But sometimes it can be much more true for certain people to the point that drinking more water is directly contributing to serious pathology in the body.
Think of yourself like a potted plant. As the contemporary saying goes, humans are basically just house plants with more complicated emotions. We need water, sunlight, and nutrients (and love), and we’re good. Well, like a houseplant, we can overwater ourselves! This is really easy to understand if the drainage hole at the bottom is blocked. Indeed, if urination is at all inhibited, this is reflective of and further contributes to a fluid backlog in the body which can manifest in all kinds of symptoms and syndromes (literally dozens). Any of the following symptoms, however slight, indicates inhibited urination and in turn dampness: it takes you a moment to start urinating (urinary hesitancy), stop and start urination, feeling incomplete after urination. Swelling in the legs is a common symptom with inhibited urination as well. This is the simplest example where we can see that drinking more water can actually lead to more issues, because we are contributing to that backlog. The body is already inundated with excess fluid that it can? transform or eliminate, and we can be contributing to that problem by drinking more water.
In Chinese medicine, urinating our excess fluid is called draining damp, and it is both a normal physiological function and a treatment strategy that we utilize to deal with damp conditions. Another normal physiological function and treatment strategy is transforming dampness. This is referring to the absorption and transformation of the fluid we take in through the digestive system (not just water but the water in our food). Throughout the digestive tract, fluid and nutrition is being extracted and absorbed.
Again theoretically, we can eat and drink whatever we want and our body will extract the good stuff and eliminate the rest (via urination and bowels), but again our bodies don’t function optimally so we need to pay more attention to the quality and quantity of food we eat and the quantity (and quality! But that’s for another pots) of water that we drink.
Another side note that should be common sense but often isn’t thought about this transformative function of the digestive system declines as we age and declines in disease. Therefore as we age or become sick, what we eat becomes way more important. On the flipside, we have observed children who can live on a diet of relative junk, and seem totally fine. Spoiler, the kids are not not totally fine; they’re often on the fast track to metabolic illness. Stay tuned for a future piece on this called:
Eat Less and Exercise More?: Is Conventional Dieting Ruining Your Health?
So our body is constantly draining damp via urination and transforming damp via the digestive system. And if either of these functions are impaired, we can have dampness issues. We’ve talked a bit about the former and alluded to the latter. If our transformation of damp function is inhibited, we can have digestive issues that can manifest in a myriad of ways. Bloating, loose stools (more commonly) or sometimes constipation, heaviness in the limbs, lack of appetite, borborygmus (fluid sounds in the abdomen), lack of thirst, low energy, and weight gain are just a few symptoms! Note: don’t diagnose yourself leave that to a Chinese medicine doctor things are more complex and nuanced than we can convey here. Having said that, another way we can self diagnose is palpating the acupuncture point Spleen 9 on the medial knee. Press hard and if it is very tender or painful, you’ve got dampness. Note: it’s possible for you to have issues with dampness and for it not to be tender or painful.
Again like in the inhibited urination, if we have inhibited digestion with dampness, drinking more water can contribute to this fluid metabolism issue. Again think of the houseplant. If the plant is not absorbing fluids well or draining fluids well, we shouldn’t add more water! It’s already gotten too much to deal with.
But wait! I’m so confused. I thought I should always drink more water and now you’re telling me to drink less! How do I know when to drink and when not to drink. Well, you see, there’s this crazy thing that we seem to have gotten away from in the last 400 years (hi Descartes, hi modern science) which is called listening to the body. It seems crazy but our body will actually tell us when we need water. This phenomenon is called thirst.
In the continued pursuit (is it a plot or is it incidental Let me know your thoughts in the comments) of trusting external authority over our internal body wisdom, we have learned to even distrust or ignore this phenomenon of thirst and simply drink more water regardless. We have even been told if we are thirsty we are already dehydrated! I think this is partially true in the sense that because we are so disconnected from our body and ignoring its more subtle messages, by the time we are truly super thirsty (noticing that thirst) we may have already been thirsty for a long time and just not paying attention but now that the message is loud enough we are dehydrated (the word dehydration alone unnecessarily invoking fear in our bodies as we read it).
The fear of dehydration! Does this story invoke fear in you. Sometimes I like to go for a short hike, and I like to do so unincumbered without carrying anything. So when I park my car I’ll drink a bit more water than I feel I need to and leave my water bottle in the car. When I go on the hike, I may feel thirsty, and then when I get back to the car I’m more thirsty and it’s very satisfying to then drink water to my body’s content! Intuitively this makes sense ancestrally, our ancestors would have to walk to a water source and then drink. And the joy and satiation they must have felt when they got to the source and could drink as much water as their bodies wanted! I feel a sliver of that when I get back to my car after the hike.
When I ask patients about their thirst, it almost doesnt compute. They usually answer “I don?t drink enough water” (regardless of how much water they are drinking). See, thirst is quite diagnostic! To oversimplify, if we have a damp condition we are not thirsty and if we have a dry condition we are excessively thirsty. Think again of the houseplant with less complicated emotions than us. If the soil is wet, it’s not thirsty. If the soil is dry, it’s thirsty.
In the case of a wet soggy earth, yes we are generally not thirsty and we should probably be drinking less water, but we also more importantly want to address this pathology and correct this fluid metabolism issue. We can do so comprehensively with Chinese herbal medicine. Herbs like fu ling (poria mushroom) or bai zhu/cang zhu (white/gray atractylodes mushroom) will help with both transforming (via digestive system) and draining (via urinary system) dampness. Before you treat yourself at home though, you need to know the full picture diagnosis and prescription that might be best that is a process.
Things in the body are often more complicated than we can conceive of. There’s cases where there’s a ton of dampness and a ton of thirst. Thirst doesn’t always indicate a dry condition. When there’s dampness this indicates a fluid metabolism issue which indicates that fluid is not being transformed or transported thus there likely will be other spots in the body that are inadequately hydrated. Such as dry skin, dry lips, dry mouth, thirst these can and often do present with a damp condition.
For example, the presentation that indicates the herbal formula Wu Ling San is one of inhibited urination where the fluid is not being steamed by the kidney yang. Therefore we can often see issues of dry skin, dry lips, or thirst, while there’s water amassment in the lower abdomen in particular. This is like a plant that soaking wet at the bottom but dry at the top.
With a dry earth, the answer is, yes, to drink more water, but that is not enough. Think of the plant that is so dry that you add water and it drains right out the bottom without absorbing. This happens in humans as well! An extreme example is Type I diabetes, which in ancient China was called “Wasting and Thirsting, of which extreme thirst and frequent urination is one symptom. Patients seldom think, and when I ask about their thirst it often doesn’t compute. Urination is another thing they seldom think about unless there is a serious issue. I pee a lot because I drink a lot of water is a phrase I hear a lot. But are you like the plant that can’t absorb? You don’t want your fluids to just drain right through you. You want your body to absorb them. This dry earth presentation is not as common as the damp earth presentation in our society (our culture and diet is very damp), but it is still common.
In the case of the dry earth, the solution is not just to drink more water we also need to address this underlying fluid metabolism issue as well using herbal medicine. When we generate fluids using herbs, we are not just adding water but we are also increasing the body’s absorptive capacity. Herbs like ren shen (ginseng), zhi gan cao (honey fried licorice), tian hua fen (trichosanthes) are several that help truly generate fluids which can be absorbed.
In short, drinking more water is not always better! Listen to your body; it is incredibly wise. If the messages it communicates seem off if you feel thirsty all the time, or never thirsty, this is a good indication that something is off with your fluid metabolism. Fluid metabolism issues are incredibly common. If you suspect there might be an issue there, see a Chinese medicine doctor. Herbs and acupuncture can help your body function optimally!
