Weekly Re-Alignment: Water Is Harder Than It Looks

This week’s (week 1) re-alignment focus was deceptively simple: 60 ounces of plain water per day. No supplements. No electrolytes. No flavoring. Just water.

I underestimated how difficult that would be.

In a culture obsessed with optimization, hydration has been turned into a product category—powders, drops, packets, performance blends. What rarely gets discussed is how challenging it is to drink adequate unmodified water, consistently, without cues from sweetness or stimulation.

Sixty ounces doesn’t sound dramatic. Until you try to do it.

Why Hydration Barely Appears in The Shift Worker’s Paradox

One thing worth naming explicitly: I did not spend much time on hydration in The Shift Worker’s Paradox. Nutrition, too, was handled carefully and at a distance.

That wasn’t an oversight. It was intentional.

Nutrition and hydration are among the most divisive and politicized areas in health science. They are crowded with absolutism, commercial interests, tribal thinking, and data stretched far beyond what it can responsibly support. For shift workers, already vulnerable to fatigue, metabolic strain, and decision overload, this landscape often creates more confusion than clarity.

So, in the book, I limited myself to first principles.

I touched the basics of nutrition because they are unavoidable, but I resisted turning the book into another prescriptive diet or hydration manual. The goal of The Shift Worker’s Paradox was not to tell people what to consume, but to explain why their physiology resists alignment in the first place.

Hydration fits squarely into that same category. Everyone agrees it matters. Almost no one agrees on how much, how often, or in what form. Once you cross that line, the conversation stops being scientific and starts becoming ideological.

This weekly re-alignment work allows something the book could not: controlled self-experimentation. Narrow variables. Honest failure. Behavioral adaptation. No monetization. No dogma.

If the book was the map, this phase is the terrain.

The Illusion of the Giant Bottle

Modern water bottles are absurdly large, and increasingly performative.

What began as a practical tool has turned into a rotating identity marker: the flavor-of-the-month brand, the limited-edition colorway, the logo that signals seriousness about health.

People collect them, replace them, upgrade them. Each bottle larger than the next, as if volume itself were progress. Half-gallon jugs. Gallon bottles. Time-stamped slogans. Oversized handles engineered for visibility more than use.

At some point, these bottles surpassed the size of a cup holder. They no longer fit in cars, backpacks, or workstations. Realistically, many would be better strapped to a luggage rack than carried through a normal day.

And somewhere along that escalation, the bottle stopped being a container and became an appendage, a stainless-steel extension of intention rather than behavior.

The bottle is present. The water is not.

As these oversized vessels sit, on desks, in cars, in hospital break rooms, the contents grow warmer, flatter, and less palatable. Even in glass or stainless steel, water that sits too long loses its appeal. Not because it becomes unsafe, but because in terms of water consumption, humans are exquisitely sensitive to taste, temperature, and effort.

When water becomes unpleasant to drink, we stop drinking it. Quietly. Without noticing.

Several things happen as water sits:

• Dissolved gases equilibrate, subtly altering taste

• Temperature drift reduces intake; cold water consistently drives consumption more reliably

• Behavioral friction increases—the bottle becomes something you “intend to finish” rather than something you refill and drink

Frequent refilling matters. Not because water spoils in a few hours, but because repetition drives intake. Smaller volumes, refilled often, outperform a single massive vessel every time.

Hydration fails not from lack of access, but from overengineering.

Water, Fat Cells, and Metabolic Space

There’s a persistent misunderstanding about water and weight.

Adipocytes don’t just store triglycerides. They exist within a tightly regulated intracellular and extracellular environment. When hydration is inadequate, the body compensates by retaining fluid in interstitial spaces and increasing conservation signals—aldosterone, vasopressin, cortisol.

Adequate hydration does not “flush fat.” That language is misleading.

What it does do is reduce false hunger signals, improve cellular volume regulation, and lower physiologic stress signals that oppose lipolysis. In that sense, water doesn’t force weight loss, it permits it.

Water competes for space not by displacement, but by signaling safety.

Week One: Missed the Mark

I did not hit 60 ounces every day this week.

Some days I came close. Some days I didn’t. That matters less than what became obvious by midweek: waiting until “later” to drink water guarantees failure.

I settled on 60 ounces, not because it’s optimal, but because it’s provisional.

Sixty ounces is no more sacred than sixty-four. Both are round numbers dressed up as science. The point wasn’t to discover a perfect target, but to choose a measurable constraint—something high enough to require intention, low enough to expose friction.

Numbers give the illusion of control. Behavior reveals the truth.

Hydration, like sleep and nutrition, does not respond well to deferred intention. It has to be front-loaded, or it doesn’t happen at all. That realization mattered more than the number

So, I changed one variable.

The Adaptation That Helped

I now drink 20 ounces immediately upon waking.

Before screens. Before decision-making. Before anything.

That single action did three things:

1. Removed the psychological burden of catching up

2. Improved morning alertness without stimulation

3. Made the remaining 40 ounces achievable instead of aspirational

Alignment isn’t about perfection. It’s about reducing friction until the behavior fits the biology you actually have, especially for shift workers.

The Quiet Lesson

Water is foundational, not glamorous. It doesn’t announce itself with metrics or dramatic outcomes. But its absence quietly taxes everything else you’re trying to fix.

This week reinforced a core truth behind The Shift Worker’s Paradox: The basics are not easy.

Next week, the work continues.

Why I Wrote - The Shift Worker’s Paradox

This book exists because nurses, and all shift workers, deserve more than advice to “hydrate” or “adjust your sleep.” They deserve research-driven strategies to mitigate risk, preserve health, and understand the exposures they shoulder in service of others.

Author: R.E. Hengsterman, MSN, MA, M.E., RN

Registered nurse, night-shift administrator, and author of The Shift Worker’s Paradox

Nursewhowrites.com

For educational purposes only. Not medical advice.

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