Drinking enough fluids every day is vital to staying healthy and making sure that your body functions properly. Fluids perform an important role in every system in your body, including carrying nutrients to your cells, and flushing bad bacteria out of your bladder and they even help keep your memory sharp and motivation high!
Overall, water is vital for overall good health.
1. Promoting Cardiovascular Health
Dehydration will lower the volume of blood in your body, so your heart will, in turn, have to work harder to pump a reduced amount of blood around your body to ensure enough oxygen is delivered to your cells. This can make even the easiest everyday activities, such as walking upstairs and other light exercises, more difficult.
2. Keeping Your Skin Healthy
When a person is very dehydrated, their skin will become less elastic. This is much different to dry skin, which is usually a result of something such as the wrong face wash or cold air and can often be soothed with the cream. Dehydration will make your skin dry, tight and flaky, and much more prone to ageing!
Drinking enough water during the day will reduce the number of wrinkles and fine lines you have, and improve your complexion by flushing out any toxins in your body. It can also be a great way to combat a range of skin issues including psoriasis, eczema, and adult acne.
3. Water Helps Keep Your Muscles Working at Their Best
When you don’t keep your body hydrated, your cells won’t maintain their balance of fluids and your electrolytes will shrivel, causing problems such as muscle fatigue. This is why it is vitally important to drink enough water whilst you are exercising – it’ll help you perform at your best!
4. Water Keeps You Cool
When your body is hot, it will release heat by expanding its blood vessels on the skin’s surface. This then results in more blood flowing around your body and heat leaving into the air.
Though, when you are dehydrated it will take a much higher environmental temperature to make your blood vessels expand, so you stay hotter.
When you’re dehydrated, you won’t have enough water to sweat either. Which will also keep heat inside your body, making your temperature rise even more.
5. Improve Work Performance
Our brains are made up of around 70% water, so it’s not too surprising that we need to keep our water intake up to improve our work performance. If you are dehydrated at work, it can affect your cognitive functions hugely. It can lead to short-term memory and the inability to process visual information properly.
A lack of water can affect your mood hugely too, leading to fatigue, a loss in concentration and productivity and reduced alertness.
What Can You do to Improve Hydration?
It’s much easier said than done, but busy schedules can make it a lot harder to keep drinking your recommended 2 liters each day. Good ways to keep up hydration include:
- Start your day with a large glass of water
- Consider a water bottle with a trackable water gauge on it – even if you can’t drink as often as you may like at work, you’ll know exactly what you have drunk.
- If you work in an office, suggest installing a mains-fed water cooler, from a company such as Glug Glug Glug – a leading supplier of Water Dispenser Manchester.
