When You Drink Salt Water Before Bed, This Is What Happens

Waking up in the middle of the night is both as annoying as it is common. Perhaps your mind can't stop racing about an incident at work. Or a car alarm went off just outside your bedroom window. Or maybe one of the most relatable urges happens. You need to pee. Many of us find ourselves blindly stumbling to the bathroom in the a.m. as the need to pee can't be ignored. According to Sleep.org, our midnight trips to the bathroom have a medical name as well. Waking up to urinate frequently is called nocturia. The majority of men and women over age 40 report waking up to use the bathroom at least once per night.

We're all about going when nature calls, but it's also important to protect the quality of sleep you're getting every night. Which is why if you are avoiding drinking water in an effort to avoid one or multiple trips to the bathroom at night, you might want to try doing the opposite.

How can drinking water right before bed be the antidote to not having to get up and pee at night? Just add a pinch of salt, says registered nurse Jonathan Steele via HuffPost. Keeping the balance of water and internal electrolytes in your system can keep you from needing to "flush" out or pee out the excess before your alarm wakes you. "Unprocessed salt helps the water to get into all of our cells," he adds.

Swapping out your nighttime cup of tea or glass of warm milk for water with a dash of salt may keep you from waking up to use the bathroom. However, the CDC claims that most adults consume more sodium than the recommended daily intake already. So if you're going to add salt to water, even if it's just a pinch, you may want to make sure your sodium consumption is at a healthy level first. After all, balancing the right level of sodium we have internally can be what keeps us from getting up at night.