I don't know what "thirst" feels like at all! It's weird because I do feel hunger. If I forget to actually eat, my stomach kicks my brain and refuses to let me concentrate until I fix it. Hydration has no equivalent, and in retrospect, it's no wonder I was suffering headaches and nausea all through college on my diet of mostly soda. After I switched to water as my primary beverage things improved dramatically, but it's not perfect. I still have to watch the signs and pay attention, or I'll dehydrate myself by simply forgetting to drink.
(I'm not an expert so take with a grain of salt)
This is it! Your hunger! It's actually thirst! When you're "hungry", try drinking a glass of water first. (Some people use this trick to lose weight, others, to stay hydrated...)
Wikipedia says 50:
In adults over the age of 50 years, the body's thirst sensation reduces and continues diminishing with age, putting this population at increased risk of dehydration.
I think adults tell kid-me to drink more water was a way of trying to get me to just develop a habit with it, since they understood the seemingly paradoxical struggle of keeping hydrated at their age.
Excessive thirst and urination is a potential symptom of diabetes, might want to get that checked out.
My discovery was Pedialyte it's meant for children but it's like the adult version or Gatorade. I drink it before I exercise and also drink as needed. I feel normal no headaches not dehydrated.
edit: I also have hypothyroidism so my hypothalamus must also be crap at regulating my thirst maybe?
And having to be stay at a hospital for a length of time for any reason is very much Not Good for an elderly person. Other illnesses, muscle atrophy, disorientation, loneliness, cognitive decline...
Hospital -> Social home, then what you have said ... and then death.
As someone who has a relative working in a hospital and another in a social home (for the elderly, but these days we get 50 years olds with dementia which is crazy), they experience it.
It is not necessarily about dehydration, but that plays a huge role, too. Sometimes a simple yet unfortunate fall is enough.
So I set about deliberately retraining myself. I stopped drinking everything but water (and beer, because life) I'd exercise (and sweat) and then drink water. I retrained my body/mind to savour the pleasantness of drinking water when dehydrated and after a year of conscious effort I more or less recovered the sense of "thirst" and would pre-emptively desire drinking water.
We are pretty simple machines.
Glad to know I'm not the only one and I do wonder how I missed this obvious step. Lately I've been doing electrolytes/water cliche of pocari sweat/etc and it really helps focus, weight, energy, etc.
I used to get really bad migraines and a neurologist gave me a prescription. The only time I used it I felt like absolute shit. Never took another one.
Now I always have my 700ml flask with me.
The article talks about the proportions between water and sodium, while you are talking about just filling up the tank with both.
I too drink water with sodium (and a few other salts) to relieve oncoming migraines but this has to be something else than the article is talking about.
When did you last pee and what color?
This is what I learned, but from others online. I also learned that sometimes our body/mind may mistake thirst for hunger and we may end up eating some food instead of just drinking water (this is generalizing things a bit). This made me a little more aware of what I think of as hunger signals and I started tracking water intake (other than from food) everyday.
BTW, a tiny nitpick: it’s “led”, not “lead”, when you talking about the past.
It is pretty nearly true.
Interestingly I also discovered that electrolyte supplements were also migraine triggers for me.
Leading me to think that electrolyte imbalance was the actually trigger. Caused by too little water increasing the concentration or added salts increasing it.
I tend not to feel thirst very strongly and think I do often confuse it with hunger.
I pay loose attention to urine colour as a gauge and make sure I drink plenty, kinda robotically when playing sports / walking in heat etc.
Afaik it's pretty harmless in general but it is associated with certain vision issues (normal tension glaucoma). Glaucoma is irreversible but has many treatment options especially if caught early. But you MUST go in for a (fast, cheap, painless) screening to catch it, it's really hard to detect unless there are issues otherwise. Please consider this if you really are showing a lot of these symptoms.
I have had mild tinnitus my whole life (with no obvious lifestyle cause), and my migraines do often manifest as pain / pressure behind the eyelid. But I don't have any of the myriad other symptoms listed for Flammer syndrome - I sleep fine, my blood pressure is fine, I'm pretty solidly built (not underweight), I don't get cold easily, etc.
It is interesting to consider I might some sort of related disorder, though!
Glaucoma is the condition that matters and if you don't run the (fast, cheap, painless) check you can miss a serious issue.
Still, like you, when I get symptoms of dehydration, I don't feel any intuitive connection with the need to drink, and I often don't feel any urge to drink at all. I have to remind myself to drink even though I don't want to.
It's weird. You'd think something so essential for life would have a better regulator.
Next things are: sleep, sugar, stress.
1) When did you last urinate, and was it a light or deep colour?
2) Can you make saliva easily in your mouth, or does your tongue rasp around?
That and "Have I had any water yet this morning / afternoon" keeps me hydrated.
I'm also a big sweater so I dehydrate quickly.
I found that I would get dehydrated to the point where my body tissues would reduce in volume or something and my Eustachian tubes would open up. They would either pop as I breathed or actually transmit my breath sounds directly into my ear from my throat. Concerning, yes.
Soon after drinking a lot of water this would go away. I soon realized that I was lacking a sense of thirst and was really stressing my body. Now I make drinking a habit.
Since I was a kid, I've thought I was "prone to migraines", and ascribed various triggers to them - sun exposure, heat, physical exertion, mental exertion, etc. I'd get a migraine sometimes after a long hike on a weekend - and also a long business meeting entirely indoors in an air-conditioned space.
Only when I was around 35, did I figure something out. All these situations lead to me getting dehydrated without any obvious accompanying feeling of thirst. Hiking all day will do it - walking around an outdoor shopping mall on a hot afternoon - or sitting in an all-day business meeting focused on the work at hand and forgetting to drink. And all these situations lead to a migraine - my only "migraine" trigger is simple dehydration, nothing more complicated.
The weird thing is, it took me a long time (decades) to put this together, because I just figured that I couldn't be dehydrated if I wasn't thirsty, and I had no association between "feeling thirsty" and getting a migraine.
I get what I consider normally thirsty in other circumstances, but somehow there's a failure mode where my body doesn't warn me. So now I just remember to chug lots of water (and electrolytes) if I'm exerting myself even if I don't really feel thirsty, and I can systematically avoid triggering migraines.
Now that I understand it the association is quite clear and obvious in retrospect.