Your pee can offer a hint about how youll deal with stress today

Your easy, stress-free day may be going down the toilet.New research has found that the color of your pee could be a clue about how well your body will deal with stress today — but the good news is, it’s a super easy problem to fix.The study’s authors say the simple factor is an “underappreciated ally in stress management.”Take a look at the bowl: If your urine is a darker color, it’s a telltale sign that your body is dehydrated.Not properly hydrating can cause a bunch of physical symptoms, including fatigue, headaches and blurred vision — and it can also impact your hormones.In a study published this month in the Journal of Applied Physiology, scientists found that people who drank less than 1.5 liters (or 6.34 cups) of water a day had dramatically higher levels cortisol levels than those who drank just above the recommended amount (about two liters for women and 2.5 liters for men).That’s not great.Cortisol, the stress hormone, makes changes to the way your body functions when you face stress.If your stress is caused by real life-or-death threats, those changes are important — but if you’re just feeling the strain of a work deadline, the side effects of cortisol can make you feel worse.And too much cortisol in the longterm can lead to anxiety, depression, problems with memory and focus, stomach issues, heart disease including heart attack and stroke, sleep issues and weight gain.So why does dehydration make you produce more cortisol? Writing for The Conversation, study authors Daniel Kashi and Neil Walsh explained that it comes down to another hormone called vasopressin, which your brain puts out when you’re dehydrated.To deal with the dehydration, vasopressin tells your kidneys to hold onto water — but it also gets involves in how your brain responds to stress, and may lead to more cortisol being released.This is far from the first study to link dehydration to people’s moods.

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