What happens when you’re dehydrated?
Dehydration occurs when your body loses too much water or fluids. This can happen when you don’t drink enough water. Around 60 percent of the human body is made up of water (please see infographic). You need water to keep your skin smooth and young-looking. It also keeps your eyes and joints lubricated, eliminates toxins and wastes, and facilitates digestion. Why wouldn’t you want water?
Are you familiar with dehydration? If not, you should be. Dehydration can be classified as mild, moderate or severe. For our purposes, we’ll try to keep it simple and straightforward, that’s a promise.
Mild to Moderate Dehydration. Many of the mild and moderate symptoms of dehydration overlap so we have clumped them together under one heading. Here are the clues:
- You’re thirsty. This is an early sign that your body needs more water. In fact when you’re thirsty you are already partially dehydrated. This clue tells you to increase your water intake (I don’t mean soft drinks or energy drinks, just water).
- Dark coloured urine usually follows closely behind if you don’t listen to your thirst signal. The number of times you urinate per day also decreases.
- You can feel dizzy or lightheaded.
- You get exhausted or tired easily (easy fatigability).
- Your lips and mouth are dry.
- You may experience constipation because there isn’t enough water for the bowels to move things through smoothly.
- You may also experience a headache. When you’re dehydrated, you also lose a lot of electrolytes (sodium, potassium and chloride). These electrolytes are needed by your body to function properly. If you lose enough of them, you can experience a headache. A headache caused by dehydration can be on just one side of your head or distributed all over. Walking or simple bending over can worsen it.
- Muscle cramps can also occur because of the loss of electrolytes.
- You feel weak.
- You feel lethargic or confused.
- You don’t urinate for more than eight straight hours.
- You don’t have tears when you cry.
- A really dry mouth, this may include difficult and painful swallowing.
- Your heart beats faster. The regular heart rate beats between 60 to 100 beats per minute. In dehydration, your heart attempts to restore blood flow to vital organs (e.g. all areas of the heart itself and the brain) by beating faster (greater than 100 beats per minute). Blood is partly composed of plasma which is also made up of water.
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- Your distal extremities (hands and feet) are cold. Your body diverts blood from your extremities to your vital organs to keep them functioning properly.
- You may have sunken eyes.
- Try taking your blood pressure. You can become hypotensive if you’re severely dehydrated. Hypotension is what causes dizziness and low levels of consciousness in dehydration.
- Try taking your pulse too. You will observe that your pulse is weak.
- You get irritated easily.
- You can also experience vomiting and seizures. These two are caused by the loss of electrolytes.
Prevent dehydration with the following tips:
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- If you’re doing strenuous exercise make sure you drink enough water to replace the bucket loads you just sweated out which soaked your shirt! Take quick water breaks and while you’re at it change that soaking wet t-shirt. This will also avoid situations where you smell like sweaty feet. Eeow.
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Related Links
References
- Koeppen, Bruce M., and Bruce A. Stanton. Berne and Levy Physiology. 6th ed. Philadelphia, PA: Mosby/Elsevier, 2010.
- Hall, John E. Guyton and Hall Textbook of Medical Physiology. 12th ed. Philadelphia, Pa.: Saunders/Elsevier, 2011.
- Ganong's Review of Medical Physiology. 24th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill Medical, 2012.
- https://www.thepaincenter.com/news/headaches-and-dehydration
- https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/dehydration/basics/symptoms/con-20030056
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