Headache & Dehydration: How much Water should you Drink?

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Are headaches and dehydration related to each other? Although there is no extended research to the relation between a headache and dehydration, but there seems to be a possible connection.

Recently James Lehman wrote an interesting article about a possible connection between getting headaches and not drinking enough water. It states that a rough estimates says 75% of all Americans are not drinking enough water. There are several reasons why they don’t drink enough water: they don’t like the taste of water, drinking water and the related events (toilet behavior) costs too much time, we simply forget to drink.

Water is the essence of all life on earth and we can not live without it for more than a few days. Drinking no water for more than 24 hours can already result in serious dehydration problems. However, not drinking enough water on a normal day could already result in a symptoms like headaches, fatigue and dizziness.

Headache Dehydration Symptoms

Our body does not always gives straight and clear signals that tell us how to behave. When our body is dehydrating, thirst is not always a present symptom. Possible symptoms of dehydration are: Muscle pain/cramps, fast heartbeat, dizziness, fatigue, headache, wrinkled, dry mouth and body weakness.

A sign that is commonly seen is muscle pain upon palpation. Another sign is the loss of skin tone. There are symptoms enough that will show someone is dehydrated, but why don’t they drink water?

I already stated that some people don’t like the taste of water. Our world is spoiled with sweetened and sugar filled substances that have more taste than water. We also prefer coffee or tea above water. Although there has been some debate about the effect of coffee, you should not drink it instead of water. Drinking 20 cups of coffee a day is not the same thing as 20 cups of water.

Another important issue is that we don’t take the time to drink enough water. Most individuals have a very busy life and work almost every day. They have no time or forget to drink enough water every day. They will only relate their headache dehydration symptoms to not drinking enough water when their doctor asks them about it.

So how much water should you drink to avoid dehydration symptoms? This is, of course, dependent on the weather and your activities. If it is hot or when you are doing exercises, then you should drink more than the average advisable amount. However, an average grown man should drink at least 70 ounces a day and a female around 50 ounces. Drinking enough water will probably reduce the chance on headaches and other related symptoms due dehydration.