How To Make Hydration A Habit

This guide will provide you simple, practical ways to meet your daily hydration goal built around James Clear’s book Atomic Habits. The idea is to take these hydration strategies and put them to use using James Clear’s proven system of developing a habit that lasts a lifetime. This combines two previous blogs: “How to Build A Good Habit” and “Are you properly Hydrated?“. I encourage you to read both of these to learn the strategies behind building a positive habit in more detail and to learn how much water you should be drinking.

The Atomic Habits system to building a positive habit is to make the habit 1) Obvious 2) Attractive 3) Easy 4) Satisfying. Let’s apply these to drinking more water.

To use this guide successfully you would ideally take one strategy from each section and put it into action. Or you may be doing some of this well already and only need to apply one strategy from the whole guide.

How to make drinking water…

Obvious

• Cell phone reminder
• Keep your filled water bottle in sight at all times
• Stack your water habit on top of something you already do. For example, if you drive to work everyday drink your water bottle on the way to work. Over time you’ve now taught your brain to associate your drive with drinking water. Another example of this would be to drink a glass of water while your coffee brews every day. Eventually, consciously remembering to drink water at these times will no longer be needed and you will do so automatically…creating a lifelong habit.

Attractive

• Flavor your water or buy flavored water
• Buy carbonated water if you prefer it
• Use a straw (this works for some people and helps them drink more)
• Eat water rich foods

Easy

• Have the water always ready to drink (eliminate as many steps between you and drinking the water as possible – like having to get up and go to the fridge to get it)
• Automate your water intake to eliminate the tracking (there are water bottles that exist that track how much water you drink automatically on an affiliated app)
• Make the math easy. If your goal is 80 fluid ounces a day buy a water bottle that is 20 ounces so you know you have to fill it up and drink it 4 times a day. No other tracking would be required.
• Drink it throughout the day. Small sips are easier than drinking a big glass.

Satisfying

• Find a way to reward yourself for hitting your daily water goal
• Create a water buddy and do this goal with a friend
• Use a marked water bottle. As you see the number of ounces you’ve drank change in real time it encourages you to keep going to achieve the goal

As you know from reading the habit blogs, there is no exact amount of days that creates a habit. The number that matters most is the frequency or how often you perform the action that you want to become the habit. To put it simply, the more times you apply the above strategies the quicker you will create a habit and that’s the KEY. You don’t want these to be tips, you want these to be lifelong habits. Tips last a day or a week, they don’t get you long term results. Habits do. Apply the above and pretty soon you won’t have to worry about drinking enough water each day, you will drink enough automatically through the positive habits you’ve created.

You got this!
– Nick