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When you consider how many different factors can negatively affect your sleep, dehydration isn’t usually high on the list. We all know that pillows, mattresses, room temperature, pre-bed routines, and body positioning play significant roles. But if you’ve been having trouble getting quality sleep and can’t find a culprit, you may want to explore dehydration as a possibility.
Keep reading to find out how dehydration affects your sleep and what you can do about it.
It is possible to be dehydrated even when you don’t feel thirsty, so relying on thirst alone to guide you is never a good idea. The consequences of dehydration can range from mild to severe, and include headaches, dizziness, confusion, fatigue, organ failure and even death in extreme cases. At night, dehydration can disrupt your sleep so you wake up not rested and still tired. It can also lead to a dry throat and nasal passages that lead to snoring and a raw, parched mouth in the morning. Trying to sleep while dehydrated can also lead to leg cramps and muscle spasms that will keep you up.
Surprisingly, dehydration actually increases the urge to use the bathroom in the middle of the night!
It makes sense that sleeping in a dry environment can dehydrate you faster than an environment with higher humidity levels. If your bedroom is particularly dry, you can become dehydrated while you sleep, or if you already are dehydrated, the situation will be made worse. And if you sleep in an environment that is conducive to dehydration, the sleep hormone melatonin may be affected, which can throw off your circadian rhythm and lead to poor quality sleep.
In 2018, the journal Sleep published research that found adults that sleep six hours per night or less have a higher chance of being dehydrated than those who slept longer.
Some believe these findings indicate that poor sleep symptoms like fatigue, headache or muddled thinking that many people experience in the morning may be caused by dehydration during the night.
The research was performed on around 20,000 Chinese and US adults. Those who claimed to sleep six hours a night or fewer across both groups had a 59% higher risk of being dehydrated than those who slept seven to eight hours regularly. The key may be a hormone called vasopressin. While you sleep, your pituitary gland uses vasopressin to signal the kidneys to retain fluid. Typically, more vasopressin is released later on in the sleep cycle, which is a period the shorter duration sleepers don’t reach.
It’s important to start the night well hydrated because you will lose fluid simply through the act of sleeping. The act of breathing leads to fluid loss, and this is exacerbated if you breathe through your mouth or snore during the night. As mentioned above, sleeping in a dry environment can increase fluid loss, as can exercising intensely in the evening or drinking alcohol to excess before bed.
It’s easy to assume that guzzling copious amounts of water before bed would be the solution to staying hydrated and having a more restful sleep, but that might not be the case. You may end up making multiple trips to the bathroom during the night, which would disrupt your sleep anyway.
It’s better to think of hydration as a whole day type of activity and not just think of it when you are faced with going to bed.
Some useful tips you can use include:
Staying hydrated at night to avoid the negative effects of dehydration can be challenging, but it’s definitely within reach. At SAMINA, we have a wide range of products that can help you have a holistic, natural sleep and avoid sleep-related dehydration. For pricing or any other questions, request more information here.
As a naturopathic doctor that focuses his practice on environmental medicine and healthy clean living,
I came across a very interesting phenomenon in practice. I have seen that there’s a very small number
of patients in my practice that seem to be extremely sensitive to the materials that their mattresses and
pillows are made of. Even though this is a small number of patients (perhaps less than 10% of my
patients), it’s still very significant as these patients have been experiencing a collection of “strange and
undiagnosed” symptoms that ended up being caused by their everyday exposure to their mattresses.
Over many years, they have seen multiple doctors, running lots of tests, and even done MRIs, in their
attempt to find out what is causing their symptoms that do not seem to be improving with attempted
treatment over the last few months or years.
The collection of symptoms that my patients report, which I believe to be related to their exposure to
VOCs from their mattresses or pillows are fatigue, balance issues/dizziness (especially in the
morning), brain fog or poor concentration, headache in the morning, and along with the more rare
symptom of numbness and tingling either in their hands, feet, or face. The reason that I feel these are
coming from their mattress and pillow is that 1) their symptoms started shortly after they purchased them. 2) Their symptoms match those of low chronic ongoing exposure to solvent/VOCs/off-gassing.
3) Their symptoms improved once they tried sleeping on a mattress that does not off-gas petroleum-based solvents VOCs. These symptoms and the improvements have been seen specifically with
regards to some memory foam-based mattresses and pillows and their subsequent removal.
One question I get asked often is “Why does my partner have no symptoms while sleeping on the
same mattress that I appear to be reactive to?”
Without going into a lot of detail here, the simplest answer is that we are individuals and have very
different genetics and different total body burdens of toxicants and toxins. Everyone responds
differently to chemicals – from chemical cleaners to pharmaceuticals, to alcohol. Depending on how
well we can clear a specific category of toxicants/toxins (due to your individual genetic profile – for
example our glutathione-s-transferase detoxification profile and our methylation profile), and how high
of a total body burden we’ve acquired based on our hobbies, diets, jobs, and lifestyle, we will all
respond very differently to chemicals. Thus, the same exact exposure to a chemical compound will
cause one person to experience no symptoms, while in another person it may manifest with very
significant and life-altering symptoms.
Seeing the improvement in my patients’ health has inspired me to purchase an organic, clean, and
non-off gassing mattress for myself, specifically one made from natural rubber, latex foam. I have been
sleeping on one for years now, enjoying a cleaner sleeping experience and sleeping better overall.
It wasn’t until recently that I have had a chance to upgrade my bed to a Samina mattress & bed frame.
I decided to invest in my health a bit more, especially considering all the research showing how
important good quality sleep is for prevention of diseases such as cardiovascular disease and
dementia/cognitive function.
When the crew from Samina came to my condo to install the bed, I was very pleasantly surprised by
the quality of the inclined bedframe and how It fits together so simply and without the use of any metal,
using a lock and key latch design. Also, with how easy it was to change from a 3 degrees incline to 5
or 7-degree incline if I ever decided to increase the incline (I started and stayed with 3 degrees for
now). It was obvious that a lot of care was taken in designing not only the bedframe but in every layer of the mattress, from the wooden panels for back support, organic latex foam, to the merino wool
layer.
To keep things short and simple, I was happy with the improvement that I experience in my sleep from
this upgrade to the Samina bed from my previous organic latex mattress. Both are great options for
improving the quality of my sleep and reducing my risk of developing any symptoms/future health
concerns and I can comfortably recommend anyone who is interested in optimizing their health to
look into upgrading to a Samina bed if they have the option to.
Dr. Aviad Elgez, ND