How To Stop Feeling Tired: How Dehydration Can Cause Fatigue

By not getting enough electrolytes and fluid, we may enter a state of dehydration. Even mild dehydration can cause tiredness and exhaustion. Plus, medications and other factors can increase your risk of dehydration, making it even harder to avoid feelings of tiredness.

Here, we’ll show you the main causes of tiredness and explain the connection between dehydration and fatigue. Plus, you’ll learn how to stop feeling tired from dehydration by using an oral rehydration solution like DripDrop ORS.

Common Causes of Tiredness and Fatigue

If you’re wondering how to stop feeling tired, it’s important to understand what causes fatigue in the first place. You probably know that getting poor sleep or having a sleep disorder can cause exhaustion and low energy levels.

However, other factors like dehydration, muscle pain caused by medical conditions, and certain medications can cause tiredness and excessive daytime sleepiness. Muscle pain — from arthritis, recent surgery, and fibromyalgia — can also cause sleep problems. In fact, studies show that fibromyalgia pain had a significant effect on sleep quality. Often, these additional factors can also worsen sleep disorders and conditions like dehydration, which makes signs and feelings of exhaustion even worse.

Here are the most common causes of fatigue:

• Dehydration
• Alcohol and drug use
• Sleep disorders, including sleep apnea and shift work disorder
• Poor sleep quality
• Not getting enough hours of sleep
• Poor sleep hygiene that affects circadian rhythm – using smartphones before sleep, watching TV shows in bed, or sleeping in a hot room
• Chronic fatigue syndrome
• Medical conditions, including heart disease, iron deficiency, and mental health disorders
• Certain medications, including antihistamines, cold and flu medications, and kidney disorder medications
• Excessive physical activity
• Leading a sedentary lifestyle
• Jet lag
• Stress
• Poor diet or eating rich foods and large meals right before bed

Whether you have a medical condition that affects your blood pressure or blood sugar levels or are exhausted after working in the hot sun without staying hydrated, fatigue is a common problem. It can affect your overall health and your ability to properly function.

Identifying the main cause of your fatigue can help you develop a treatment plan to boost your energy levels. If you have a sleep disorder, medical condition, or suffer from a lack of sleep on a regular basis, talk to a doctor to get a complete diagnosis and make a protocol to improve signs. A doctor can also help you identify lifestyle factors and daily life activities that may cause poor quality sleep or dehydration and make you tired.

Often, your feelings of tiredness may be caused by poor habits — such as not eating a balanced diet or not getting enough exercise — or simply dehydration. Read on to learn how dehydration is connected to fatigue, and discover the best approach to managing and avoiding dehydration. With few changes, you’re more likely to feel energized all day.

The Link Between Dehydration and Tiredness

Dehydration is a medical condition in which your body loses fluid and electrolytes more quickly that it can replace them. One of the most common signs of dehydration is fatigue. You may also feel dizzy, lightheaded, and especially thirsty. That’s because your body needs to be properly hydrated to feel energized and function optimally.

Here’s what happens when you’re dehydrated: As dehydration sets in, your blood pressure drops, leading to poor circulation and reduced blood flow to your brain. This causes feelings of sleepiness. You also experience a drop in blood fluid volume — that’s the total amount of fluid in cells including plasma and red and white blood cells. This makes your heart work harder to pump the proper amount of nutrients, oxygen, and fluid to different cells, causing fatigue.

In addition, dehydration can affect performance and mood, leading to fatigue and exhaustion. As your body fights to deliver the right amount of nutrients and fluid to cells, you may develop muscle weakness and cramps — another common sign of dehydration. Since your muscles aren’t getting what they need, you may feel tired and unable to lift as much weight or move as quickly as normal.

Dehydration and poor sleep are also linked. Dehydration can cause muscle spasms that wake you and disrupt your natural sleep cycle. In addition, dehydration dries out your nasal passages, causing snoring that can decrease sleep quality.

When it comes to dehydration and sleep, it’s a two-way street. If you suffer from poor sleep, your risk of dehydration increases, making fatigue even more likely. That’s because poor sleep or not getting enough sleep can inhibit the release of vasopressin — a hormone that is essential in hydration. Without proper amounts of this hormone, you may develop dehydration, which increases the effects of tiredness.

Causes of Dehydration

Dehydration commonly causes fatigue, and it’s easier than you may think to become dehydrated. Even mild cases of dehydration can cause feelings of tiredness and impact your body’s ability to perform essential functions.

Dehydration commonly occurs when you’re sick and are vomiting or have diarrhea. That’s because you lose essential electrolytes quickly, and it can be difficult to keep foods and liquids down to replenish those lost minerals. It’s also commonly caused by certain medications including diuretics, laxatives, allergy medications, and weight loss pills.

Another way you may become dehydrated is through sweating. Sweat is a natural process that your body uses to cool down its core temperature. When you sweat, electrolytes and water are pushed to the surface of your skin, evaporate, and produce a cooling effect. However, if you’re not drinking enough fluids and electrolytes while you sweat, you may become dehydrated.

The risk of dehydration increases when you’re working on a job site in the hot sun, when you’re training outdoors in high temperatures, and even when you’re going about your daily business when it’s hot outdoors. Certain medical conditions, including kidney disease, can increase the risk of dehydration. Older adults and children are also at higher risk for dehydration.

Hydration isn’t just about getting enough water — you can’t just reach for a glass of water when you recognize the signs of dehydration. Electrolytes are a key component of the hydration equation. You need precise ratios of them in order to maintain healthy fluid levels and to fend off dehydration and signs of fatigue.

How To Stop Feeling Tired

When it comes to how to stop feeling tired, one of the most important considerations is staying hydrated. The best way to avoid dehydration that can cause fatigue is to drink an oral rehydration solution like DripDrop ORS.

An oral rehydration solution contains medically relevant amounts of electrolytes your body needs to stay hydrated. Like an IV — which is a saline solution containing water and sodium — oral rehydration solutions contain the precise amounts of electrolytes, including sodium and potassium, which your body needs to avoid dehydration and the resulting tiredness.

Here’s how it works: Your body needs more than just plain water to stay hydrated. It needs essential minerals, known as electrolytes, to help maintain proper fluid balance and hydration both inside and outside of your cells.

These electrolytes — which include sodium, potassium, calcium, and magnesium, among others — play an important role in your body. You need electrolytes to move your muscles, send neurotransmitter signals from your brain to various organs, and retain and regulate healthy fluid volume levels.

Sodium in particular plays an important role in hydration and thus keeps you from feeling fatigued as the result of dehydration. That’s because sodium makes you feel thirsty when you’re dehydrated. It also works closely with glucose in the sodium-glucose cotransport system to increase the rate at which your body absorbs electrolytes and water, helping to provide faster dehydration relief.

In this system, glucose helps your body absorb essential electrolytes like sodium more quickly. In turn, sodium helps to manage fluid levels and induces thirst, helping to restore proper electrolyte and fluid balance.

DripDrop ORS provides a precise ratio of electrolytes including sodium to help remedy dehydration. While traditional ORS had a strong salty taste that was unpalatable, DripDrop ORS improves on the World Health Organization’s oral rehydration solution standards, offering a delicious taste with flavors including watermelon, berry, and spiced apple cider.

Fight Dehydration With DripDrop ORS

When you're in a state of dehydration, no amount of water is enough. Your body needs the perfect balance of sodium and glucose to help absorption. With the precisely balanced ratio, you can replenish vital electrolytes and fluids that relieve dehydration quickly. Plus, DripDrop ORS supplies vitamins like zinc, potassium, and magnesium, which are essential to support your overall health.

DripDrop ORS is a proven alternative for treating mild to moderate dehydration. It's powerful enough to use in extreme circumstances but safe enough for everyday use. DripDrop ORS was developed by a doctor on a mission to defeat life-threatening dehydration. It contains more electrolytes and less sugar compared to sports drinks and energy drinks, making it a healthier and more effective choice.

For cases of mild to moderate dehydration, DripDrop ORS is a fast, effective, and great tasting remedy. Its convenient packaging allows you to have DripDrop ORS when you need it, where you need it. Get started with our most popular multi-flavor pouch for dehydration relief fast. Or, learn more about how you can save up to 25% on every purchase when you subscribe.