Comment by namibj

That's more for the intrusive thought aspects of "being thirsty", which get you to stop "sitting by the campfire" and "walk over the 5 minutes to the stream, to shovel a few handfuls of water into your mouth".

Or these days tell your zoom meeting you'll be right back, muting, and walking over to the water cooler.

Or at home pause the family movie night to get up and refill the water pitcher from the tap (or walk to the pantry and fetch a new "bottled water").

If you're trying you should be able to perceive a difference between when drinking half of this 400ml cup/glass of non-sparkling non-cold (at least nowhere near ice cold) water is something you predict to leave you feeling "more comfy" as soon asyou're "done swallowing" and "have gotten about 2 breaths finished counting from when you have successfully re-assumed your comfy sitting position", vs. "less comfy".

Don't drink the water if you're feeling like you ought to regret it if going by hour-scale average comfy-ness.

To tune your perception make sure to give yourself enough headspace to allow the feeling pre-drinking to temporarily burn into memory ready for later retrieval when you'll reflect back on your hydration actions of the past 2~5 hours. Then you either drink or not drink (usually you'll soft-force by picking whether to go up and fetch a full cup or do nothing (I.e., just keep doing whatever you're engrossed in right then) until next time you remember the idea of hydrating). A few hours later when you remember you burned that feeling into same-day-only/wipe-at-sleep memory you recall what you did/didn't do about hydrating. And now you have the ground truth about if you feel better or worse hydrated than those hours ago.

And you burn in that you either "should go drink some water when you spare a thought about it and feel like this again" or "should refrain from gulping down [more] water when you're considering whether to and you feel like that".

Note that you're not putting your feeling into words for this! You're just focusing "on the moment" for a bit, long enough to make it a moment you'll remember (lack of specialty will make you forget it by the next morning or at least within a few days if nothing special happens). Because you literally don't _know_ how to express it into words: that's literally what you're learning with this entire process.

Note that drinking the water when you feel low key thirsty but don't get (nearly as much) hydration-feel-good out of it by the 30~60 minute mark (depending on how much you just stuffed your gut with food that's kinda in the way of the hydration getting absorbed) as you thought you should have, then you may be suffering from some acute lack of salt/electrolytes.

If it feels bad, like hangover/heartburn and/or substantial headache, take a pile of salt that looks about a third of an inch cubed (60% of a cubed centimeter volume) (technically this is "1/8th US Teaspoon (tsp)"), lick-pour it from your palm onto your tongue or pour the spoon you have it on onto your tongue or whatever, followed by washing it off your tongue and into your belly with about 300~500 ml (10~17 US fl oz) of water ideally not colder than half way between fridge and room temperature (closer to room temperature should help!). Unless you stuffed yourself with more than about 5 bites of food in the past hour, you should feel much relieved after 20~40 minutes. It will take time, usually more than 15 minutes!

In less severe cases you may try to mix a stick/pouch of hydration/"oral rehydration solution" mix with the ideally about 200~250ml (6.8~8.5 fl oz) but make sure to mix to the concentration the instructions tell you (drink only about that much if the pouch had powder for 350 ml (12 fl oz) or more, and drink the reminder an hour later (if less than that; else portion it hourly into this much each; for many hours duration put it in the fridge)). Otherwise you basically do as for plain water hydration perception training detailed above. Learn if that feeling is an acute electrolyte deficiency dehydration. Because beyond the very initial instant satisfaction of the water running down your throat and coating your mouth you pretty much only make it worse from drinking salt-free water :D