Drinking is essential, especially in summer, when an increase in external temperature doubles the loss of water in our body, but it should not be exaggerated, otherwise the body reacts.
It is good for everyone to always take into consideration the amount of water to be taken daily, different according to age, sex, physical constitution and physical activity carried out.
THE’WHO (World Health Organization) recommends it as an indispensable for our health and also as a cure -all to reduce urinary infections, kidney stones and risk of bladder cancer. We must also pay attention to the food we introduce, in fact fruit and vegetables naturally contain liquids, therefore they must still be considered in the calculation of our needs.
Doctors advise to drink at any time of the day, but the ideal is just felt the stimulus of thirst, sent by the hypothalamus; If you drink continuously, however, the brain’s ability to send this signal is altered. As for the type of water, if you do not suffer from particular diseases, you can safely drink the tap water, controlled and ecological, as it makes us produce less waste.
Drinking too much water, however, can create health problems, even serious, and there is a risk of becoming “Aquaholist”that is, suffering from a real dependencewith the need to take liquids continuously.
Speaking in these terms of an harmless substance such as water, not to say essential for our life, may appear somewhat strange and incredible, but this phenomenon exists and must not be underestimated.
In recent times we hear often and everywhere of addictions, both the most classic ones (such as alcohol, smoke, substances), and the most recent ones (such as gambling, internet, sex/pornography, shopping), with their specific characteristics; The dependence on water makes no difference and fully follows all aspects: craving (unstoppable desire, research), tolerance, abstinenceuntil they reach fatal outcomes for overdose.
Precisely for this reason, it causes problems of various types, inconvenience and suffering to those who are affected, as if it were an addiction to another substance and, therefore, requires serious and targeted care and therapies.
The most curious case jumped to the chronicle concerns a 25 -year -old English girl, J. Jarvis, who drinks regularly and compulsively about 6 liters of water per day, until he reached certain moments, at 16. He declares to a famous magazine that he had had a “passion” for water from an early age, but had never considered his “habit” a problem and was absolutely unaware of the risks he ran; medical visits have excluded specific organic pathologies such as diabetes (who pushes those who suffer to drink a lot) for her), also because, in reality, compulsive drinkers do not drink so much for a real feeling of thirstbut under a push, a compulsive need.
The girl, in fact, says: ” I don’t drink water because it is good for me, but because I like it. And I thought it was the last way to the world to harm to my health. I have been doing it since I’m small and I have lost account of how many times my parents have brought me to the doctor because they thought I was diabetic: but nothing, I’m healthy“.
It seems that the famous British journalist and chef Nigella Lawson also suffers from it and, she too, has only recently become aware of it; Other well -known, but less fortunate names are the marathon runner David Rogers who died in 2007 precisely from water intoxication, and the actor Antony Andrews who avoided the same fate, while remaining in a coma 10 days.
British researchers (the phenomenon seems to be more present or, at least, more found for now in Anglo -Saxon countries), in fact, in addition to having coined the term, they have shown widely how this habit can cause disorders and imbalances.
First of all, we sleep less and bad: when we sleep our brain secretes an antidiuretic hormone that regulates the functioning of the kidneys and avoids getting up during the night to urinate, if the level of liquids in our body exceeds a certain limit, the hormone becomes inactive; Furthermore, it sweats more: with the heat it is natural that there is a little hyperhidrosis, to disperse heat, but drinking more than necessary, sweating increases in an exaggerated way, as a reaction to be able to free excess liquids; Finally, the blood changes and dilutes too much, meeting an electrolytic imbalance, that is, an alteration of the concentration of sodium and potassium, two essential minerals for our health.
The decrease in sodium, called hyponatrheria or hyponatremia (from the Latin term “natrium”, that is sodium), or even more rarely hyposodemia, is the most serious consequence; It can present itself in chronic or acute form and, in medicine, it can also depend on other factors, such as kidney disease, cardiac and also on situations such as the abuse of diuretic drugs and the loss of mineral salts due to vomiting and/or diarrhea (these events can be typical in subjects with eating disorders).
The symptoms are varied: tiredness, muscle cramps, headache, difficulty concentration, respiratory failure, up to more serious cases such as convulsions, hemiparesis, cerebral edema and even death; It seems that neurological problems arise more frequently in case of acute hyponatriemia.
The treatment, of course, changes according to the trigger and gravity: if the disorder is mild, it is generally sufficient to stop harmful habit (e.g. drinking too much water, using diuretics, etc.); If, on the other hand, the problem is now consolidated, specialist medical care must be used.
As regards the possible psychological explanations of this disorder, various hypotheses have been formulated: it may be a real dependence (where the “substance” is, in this case, water) or an obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorder, as it satisfies several criteria, or it can be a symptom within a more complex pathology, such as a disorder of eating behavior (e.g. subjects with anorexia that drink in excess for excess for excess. Keep under control the sense of hunger, others with bulimia that introduce many liquids to make self-induced vomiting easier).
In sub-clinical situations, it may be a behavior that is undertaken in the incorrect conviction of purifying and/or losing weight, perhaps learned and supported by deceptive news that depopulated on TV, magazines, websites.
Although at first glance it may seem simple, it is not a habit that can be abandoned by themselves and without effort: like all psychological disorders needs a special treatment followed by a psychologist-psychotherapist (it must always be kept in mind that it is not a mere organic disease); Since the same difficulties are found that for other addictions and/or for obsessive-compulsive disorders, a path of Cognitive-behavioral psychotherapythe most suitable and effective in these cases, which is based on widely experienced techniques and guarantees, in a short time, a significant improvement in the person’s quality of life.
