Over at The Conversation, Nikolaj Travica has a great breakdown of a) studies suggesting that drinking more water might help alleviate some symptoms of anxiety and b) why that could be the case.
Among other studies, he points to this from 2018, which showed that, after controlling for confounding factors, drinking fewer than 2 cups of water/day was associated with a 73% and 54% increment in the risk of depression.
Meanwhile, those who drank more than 5 cups of water/day were significantly less likely to report depression and anxiety.
Now I know what you’re thinking.
What about those controls?
For example, if you exercise more, you drink more. We know that exercise reduces symptoms of depression and anxiety.
So is it the exercise or water consumption that’s helping?
There are loads of potentially confounding factors like that, but the researchers controlled for them, and found the relationship between water consumption and depression, particularly strong (the link with anxiety was less clear).
From both that particular study and ones before it, the researchers concluded: “due to bidrectional link between metabolic status and mental health, it might be concluded that water consumption can affect mental disorders via affecting metabolic status.”
Further, they concluded that a possible mechanism for water’s effect on depression might be that drinking more water decreases activity of the sympathetic nervous system, which reduces plasma levels of norepinephrine.
Travica at the Conversation points to other reasons why water consumption might affect our mood.
For example, dehydration can increase the stress hormone, cortisol, it can also affect the levels of serotonin in our brain, and it can cause the brain to slow down and not function properly.
Research is still limited.
And it’s worth noting that, often times, when we’re depressed, self-care goes out the window, and simply walking to the kitchen to fill up our glass can seem really tough.
So there’s a chicken-egg situation, but researchers acknowledge there could be a bidirectional relationship.
And, despite the relative paucity of research studies, the theoretical case for drinking more water for our mental health certainly seems pretty strong.
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