Today I’m talking about the smartwatch. I have a Samsung smartwatch and it has helped me a lot with everyday life. I know that it’s not cheap to buy a smartwatch of any kind, but it has already been worth the money. I was lucky enough to get it as a special Christmas present from my mother last year, because I didn’t have the money to buy it myself.
I’m not just talking about the smartwatch today, but also something as simple as a water bottle. I thought it might be a bit much to do an entire post on a water bottle, but I was tempted because both the bottle and the smartwatch are helping me with the same thing: drinking enough water.
You see, I have always struggled with both eating and drinking. It’s not that I don’t want to, but a lot of the time I simply forget about it. I rarely, if ever, feel thirsty or hungry. Occasionally I have experienced such feelings, so I understand the concept, but it’s not something I’m very familiar with. I may want to eat or drink, but that is often not based on a need, but simply a desire to eat or drink something very specific. Like when you get a craving for pizza. If you do, you are happy to eat it, but you’ll really be just fine if you don’t.
So, remembering to drink water has always been very difficult to me. I don’t particularly like the taste of water, and to be clear, yes, water has taste. In fact, there are some areas where I really dislike the taste of the water and some areas where water almost tastes good.
I experimented a lot with infused water like simply things like adding lemon, grapefruit, or mint leaves to my water. In general, it made my water taste better, so it was easier to drink, but it didn’t make me drink more. The main problem being that I simply forget to drink.
When I started experimenting with infused water, I bought a special bottle with a filter to make it easier, but even when I brought the bottle with me, I still forgot to drink. Some days I would drink only a glass of water, sometimes less.
When I do things, whatever that might be, I can get hyper focused. When that happens, I am so focused on what I am doing that the rest of the world practically stops to exist. I get completely absorbed and often it can even be a challenge for other people to get my attention. When that happens, I forget to eat, drink and even go to the toilet. Then, when I stop, I suddenly really need to go to the toilet, because that I start feeling, but water and food is not something I feel a need for. That can really be a problem.
I wasn’t sure what my water intake actually was, because I never paid any attention to it. I started thinking about it after I had surgery, because I had to take my medication several times every day and then suddenly realised that I was drinking more water than I ever had.
I have also always had trouble sleeping, sometimes taking sleeping pills to help me, but they have always been mild ones that I don’t need prescription to get, so to be honest, they never really worked a lot. I have long periods, from weeks to years, where I barely sleep at night and when I do, I feel even worse when I wake up.
Because I wanted to monitor my sleep and water intake, I decided I wanted a smartwatch and I was lucky enough to get one for Christmas last year. My mother really wanted to encourage me to get better, because even though the surgery itself had gone very well, I wasn’t healing very well and was in a lot of pain and medicated for that pain for a very long time.
Now, I do two things to get enough water every day. I always carry my water bottle around with me and I regularly monitor my water intake. What I have discovered is that a lot of this can be done simply by creating a new, beneficial habit.
The first many months I used my smartwatch to monitor my water intake, I didn’t remember to drink water during the day. I would check my smartwatch in the evening to check how many glasses I had that day and, in the morning, as I was checking my sleep record. Of course, in the morning I would never have had enough time to drink any water when I checked, but I wanted to get in the habit of checking my watch. In the evening, I’d always end up drinking just one more glass, because I have a goal of 9 glasses every day and sadly, I only ever got around 2 glasses in the beginning.
Then, something happened. I started checking my water intake during the day. It was just once in a while in the beginning, but soon I would check at least once every day and that helped, because suddenly I was on 3 glasses every day. I would notice that I hadn’t had enough water and drink a glass.
Now, as I was getting better, I started realising that sometimes I couldn’t make myself drink the entire glass of water. It was a problem, because if I left half a glass somewhere, I’d forget, and I couldn’t make a note on my smart watch. At first, I forced myself to drink all of it, but that made me feel worse about drinking for a while. So, I started drinking from my water bottle regularly. One bottle of water the same as two glasses on my watch.
I quickly realised that I needed to bring my bottle everywhere. Literally, even if I just went from one room into another, because I often lose track of time when I get focused on something and that doesn’t happen only when I want to be focused. It can happen anytime.
Bringing my bottle and regularly checking my water intake has completely changed my habit of drinking. Now, I drink 9 glasses of water every day, often more. It has changed how I feel, because I my head is clearer, and I have more energy. I just feel better every day.
Sometimes, it feels like such a hassle to always record my water intake, but I have tested a few times now, and if I don’t do it every time I empty my bottle, then I forget and suddenly a whole day has passed and I have no idea if I had any water or not.
The smartwatch/ bottle combination is definitely worth the trouble to record it, and the smart watch has even helped me with things I wasn’t expecting.
Because I often forget everyday things, one of the things I almost never know is what day it is. I could be Monday or Wednesday or any other day of the week, I always forget. I also forget the date of the month, but now, I feel less stressed about forgetting. It’s because I forget appointments and bills and many often things, because I don’t keep track of times and dates. I never remember birthdays or special holidays or anything else either.
My smartwatch face always has this information on it: time, date and month, steps, battery level and day of the week. It makes me feel less pressured, because I know this information is always available. I can add notifications as well, so my watch can tell me whenever I need to remember something.
I also monitor my sleep regularly, as it measures everything from the time, I fall asleep and wake up, to how much time I was awake during the night, REM sleep, light sleep and deep sleep. I can see the average times and percentages, which helps me figure out if something is wrong, because I don’t always know. As I’ve said before, I don’t feel my body the same way neurotypicals do. I’ll write a post dedicated solely to this topic soon.
The most important thing is, now I drink enough water every day. I still need to figure out how to remember to eat, but the same thing won’t work for that as well, since I often don’t even want to eat.
You may also argue that most mobiles can do a lot of this, thus making the smartwatch redundant. Well, for some people it might work, but it doesn’t work for me. I often leave my mobile somewhere and hardly look at it, so remembering to bring it is such a hassle. I don’t have many friends and I don’t talk to them very often either, not because I don’t want to, but because I forget time.
My smartwatch is always on my right wrist (yes, right), always within reach and within sight, which helps me remember. I don’t have to press buttons or anything, I just twist the edge of the watch and change the screen to add water and coffee. I add my coffee intake as well, because I have had a bad habit of drinking way too much coffee every day. In high school I often had two pots every day, but now I try to only drink one cup – sadly I often end up drinking 2 or 3 cups every day, but that’s okay.
The most important thing when trying to change a habit is not blaming yourself or getting angry with yourself when something isn’t perfect. You don’t have to drink 9 cups of water or day one, you just have to do your best to drink any water at all. You don’t have to force yourself not to drink coffee either, simply do your best to drink as little as possible if that is what you want.
Changing a habit is a journey, it will take a while, because if it didn’t, it wouldn’t be a habit.
