Drink more water, even if you don’t like it

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Everyone knows it, but nobody does it: drink enough water! It helps with weight loss and feeling better, but how do you actually go about it? You may manage to drink more water for a week or a month. But how do you really keep it up?

At its core, it can be very simple. We often take an all-or-nothing approach, but once you let go of that, giving up the other drinks you enjoy isn’t such a big step either.

It really comes down to:

  • Start small. Focus on adding water rather than replacing things.
  • Drink a glass or half a glass of water alongside a cup of coffee or something else you already do.
  • Explore what works for you. What do you enjoy?
  • Build awareness. What does soda do to you? What does coffee do to your body, mood and so on? What about water?

Although this sounds simple, there are often a few stumbling blocks.

In this post, I’ll explore these points with practical examples and tips for avoiding those obstacles. If you already like drinking water but forget during the day, for example, that’s a separate problem you can solve.

Tip 1: Get your day off to a good start

When you start the day well, it’s easier to keep it going. You’re already doing well and often don’t want to slip back. It’s particularly easy in the morning to fall back on an existing ritual, but you don’t have to.

How do you make it easier to start the day with water? Make what you used to do harder, and make water or tea the easiest option.

  • Prepare a glass or bottle of water the day before. The trick is to put it somewhere you’ll notice quickly, such as in the fridge or on your desk.

  • Before leaving for work, fill a flask with tea or a bottle with water. That way, you don’t immediately start your day stressed with coffee. That’s a trap for me, and I find this tip really helps.

  • Get a glass of water with your coffee. If you like starting the day with soda or coffee, get a glass of water to wash it down too. Then you’ve already had your first glass.

Tip 2: Make it easy for yourself

Part of behavior engineering, which is essentially what we’re doing for ourselves here, is making the actions you want easy. Make what you don’t want to do harder.

There are several ways to do this.

Focus on starting steps

One tendency of the brain is to slam on the brakes when change comes along. The brain likes drawing conclusions and wants to protect us, but that mechanism comes from a time before supermarkets full of meat, sugar, salt and fat.

Starting very small, even with just one sip of water in the morning, lets you dismantle that mechanism until you’re used to the small step. You can always continue, and once you’ve started something, it’s often easier to go a little further.

Focusing on starting steps, consciously noticing them and celebrating them makes learning new habits much easier.

Arrange your environment

Is the Nespresso machine in plain sight on the counter, or is the fridge already full of cans and squash? Naturally, that makes it very easy to reach for them straight away. Why not see how you could reverse that?

Add a few steps before you get to your coffee. Put your bank card behind something if you live opposite the supermarket. There are all kinds of creative ways to manage how easily you do the things you want occasionally rather than by default.

Tip 4: What if you don’t like water?

If you don’t like water, keep things enjoyable. If you drink lots of squash or soda, of course plain water seems boring. But your tastes really do change as you drink less soda. If you try soda again after drinking water for a long time, you’ll notice that sweet stuff tastes completely different. Some people even feel sick from it!

Don’t go straight to still tap water. Try enjoyable alternatives such as sparkling water or tea, dilute your squash, or move from soda to squash first.

There are many different alternatives that are still healthy. The main thing is that you can drink as much as you like.

I replaced coffee with tea. What I mainly wanted was a hot drink without too much caffeine. That quickly leads you to a nice strong herbal tea. If you do want a little caffeine, you can always have green tea.

I limit green tea to one or two cups a day in the morning.

Alongside herbal or green tea, you can also try fresh mint tea. It’s often a nice thing to order when sitting on a café terrace.

There’s plenty of choice. You don’t have to stick with one option for the rest of your life either. Choose whatever you feel like at that moment. Sometimes waiting for tea to cool takes too long for me, and I choose still water. Sometimes I want bubbles.

Tip 5: Awareness: what do you gain, and what does it cost?

You probably landed on this article because you want to drink more water, or replace something else, such as coffee, with water. There’s a reason for that. What is it?

Speaking from my own experience, I realized I drank far too much coffee and consumed far too much caffeine. It caused me quite a lot of stress. So what do you gain from replacing that coffee with water? For me, it was feeling fresh and clear-headed, and no longer rushing through the day.

When you slip into your old habits, it’s useful to pause and consider what they give you and what they cost.

You can use visualization to strengthen this picture. Practice in your mind at moments when it’s easy, so that when the choice comes up later, making the choice you actually want becomes easier.

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