I’ve had chronic dehydration for most of my life. I never realised there was anything wrong: I never felt thirsty, and even as a kid I hated drinking water. 8 glasses of water seemed like an awful lot, and drinking water is annoying.

I had a particular issue that after reading chronic dehydration symptoms was clearly that: I got dehydration headaches. I never knew what caused these, but they sometimes went away after a shower. Even now, the time delay between drinking and the headache going away makes it non-obvious if I didn’t already know that’s what it was.

I get a lot of water from food: carrots, apples and cucumbers all have a lot. I also seem to get some amount from the air: I can tell the change of seasons, and moving to a different environment made me a lot thirstier. Both of these may be adaptations the average person doesn’t have.

People tell me the feeling of ‘dry mouth’ is supposed to be really bad. I don’t know what this is exactly, but I think I feel like this most of the time, and it’s not bad at all. I can tell when I’m relatively thirstier because it’s easier to gulp the whole glass down and feel like I want more, but most of the time after a single gulp I’m already tired of it.

I’d also feel like it was fine because I still had enough water to sweat. When this doesn’t happen, I get really light headed and feel awful instead of sweating, and again that has pierced my lack of understanding of thirst and got me to drink something. People tell me they’d expect you to die if you didn’t have enough water to sweat, but that doesn’t seem to happen.