The first drink

You don’t wake up tired. You wake up dehydrated.

The mid-morning fog isn’t only about how you slept. Part of it is water, and the fix is one glass you can pour tomorrow.

Callum, Avocado Ninja · 5 minute read

The alarm goes and, honestly, you’re fine. Lunchboxes. A missing PE kit. A child who has decided, today, that she doesn’t like toast. Out of the door, through the gate, at your desk by nine. And then, somewhere around half ten, the lights go dim. You read the same email twice. You open a tab and forget what for. Someone says a name and it takes a beat too long to land.

You slept. Properly, more or less. So you blame the usual suspects: the kids, your age, the screens, the general weight of being the grown-up. And you reach for whatever gets you to lunch.

Here’s what nobody has told you. Part of that fog has very little to do with your sleep. You did not wake up tired. You woke up dehydrated, and you’ve been getting more dehydrated ever since.

Which is good news, because dehydration is the easiest problem you’ll fix all year. One glass, about two minutes, nothing you don’t already have in the kitchen. It’s how I start every day, it’s the method from my book Morning Momentum, and here is the whole of it.

You lost about a cupful of water in your sleep

You lose water all day without noticing. About 300 to 400 ml goes out through your skin, and about the same again just from breathing, before a drop gets anywhere near your bladder. Hold a hand in front of your mouth and breathe out. That warmth is wet. Now do that all night, under a duvet, with nothing going back in.

By morning you’ve breathed and sweated out about a cupful, plus whatever went to the bladder. Then it’s the loo, breakfast, shoes, door, and the glass of water you might have drunk never quite happens.

By the time you’re thirsty, you’re already foggy

Thirst is a late message. Lawrence Armstrong at the University of Connecticut puts the point where you actually feel it at about one to two per cent down. Before that, nothing. You’re just a bit flat and you don’t know why.

Now the bit that made me sit up. In 2012, a team at the same university ran two studies, one with 25 healthy young women and one with 26 healthy young men, and let them get mildly dehydrated, about one and a half per cent of their normal body water. Headaches. Trouble concentrating. Fatigue. And it made no difference whether they had walked for forty minutes or sat still. Sitting still was enough.

So the fog turns up at about one and a half per cent. Thirst turns up at about one to two. They arrive together, and nobody connects them, because who feels thirsty at half ten? You’re not thirsty. You’re foggy. Same thing.

Why the first glass needs something in it

You might remember the experiment from school: a battery, a bulb, two wires dipped in a beaker of water. With plain water the bulb barely glows. Stir in a spoonful of salt and it lights.

Your body runs on the same principle. Every signal your nerves send is electrical: lift your arm, hold that thought, remember her name. It’s carried by sodium and potassium dissolved in water. Magnesium is used in the reactions that make your energy, and is recognised as contributing to a reduction of tiredness and fatigue. Calcium is part of how muscles and nerves work. Plain water is good. Water with minerals in it is closer to what you’re made of.

Salt does one more job. It helps your body keep the water rather than pass it, which is why rehydration drinks have salt in them. They use far more than a pinch, so a pinch takes your glass a little way in that direction. Call it a nudge.

Here’s exactly what I do

Before food, before anything.

1. 500 ml of water, filtered if you can. A pint glass is near enough.
2. A pinch of unrefined sea salt. A real pinch, thumb and two fingers; it should be barely there on the tongue. Unrefined matters, because refining strips out trace minerals that unrefined keeps. If all you have tomorrow is table salt, use it and switch when you can.
3. Stir until it has dissolved. Properly dissolved, no grit at the bottom.
4. Drink it before anything else. I have mine in one go.

If you’d rather, hydration salts go in instead of the sea salt: a blend of four mineral salts, sodium bicarbonate, potassium carbonate, magnesium carbonate and calcium carbonate. Same glass, same stir.

The easiest way I know to have filtered, mineralised water ready every morning is a Ninja Jug on the side. It takes out 97 per cent of the chlorine, along with heavy metals and hardness, and puts calcium, magnesium and potassium back in. Fill it when you get up; the filter is quick, and all that’s left is the pinch and the stir. But don’t wait. Tap water and a pinch of salt works tomorrow.

That’s the whole method. For the rest of the day the NHS line is the right one: six to eight glasses of fluid, and pee that’s a clear pale yellow.

Tomorrow morning, then

The alarm goes. You’re up. Before the lunchboxes, before the hunt for the kit, before you’ve checked a single thing, you’re standing in the kitchen with a glass of water, a pinch of salt stirred through it. Two minutes. Then the morning carries on as it always has.

At half ten, notice. Read the email once. Open the tab and know why. It’s the easiest thing you’ll stick with this year, because it costs two minutes and asks nothing else of you.

You didn’t wake up tired. You woke up dehydrated. Tomorrow, don’t.

Pure water. The jug filters what comes out of the tap.

See the jug

Nutrient juices. Wheatgrass, broccoli sprout juice, and broccoli sprout and beetroot.

See the juices

Where the numbers come from. The water lost through skin and breathing is the standard physiology figure (Guyton), as cited in PLoS ONE, 2011. The one to two per cent thirst line, the 1.5 per cent figure, and the two studies of 25 women and 26 men are from the University of Connecticut’s own account, published 21 February 2012. The line on salt and keeping water is from the beverage hydration index trials, reviewed in Nutrients, 2021; the effect is clear at rehydration-drink levels of salt and small at a pinch. The 6 to 8 glasses and the pale-yellow check are the NHS page on water, drinks and hydration. The method is from Morning Momentum. The jug line is the product page. Nothing here is a treatment for any condition.