Drinking a lot of water every day is pretty necessary for your overall health and general well-being. I know this, but still, I struggle with it on a daily basis.

I have been known to go days without having a single sip of water, only to end up feeling dehydrated and absolutely terrible later on. As much as I hate that feeling, though, I’ve never been able to motivate myself into actually drinking a proper daily serving of water for more than a few days at a time. So when I heard about Hidrate Spark, a fancy water bottle that promises to help you stay on track with your water intake, I knew I needed to try it.

Hidrate Spark was made for people like me: it’s a high-tech water bottle that tracks how much water you’re drinking and sends you reminders throughout the day to pick up the bottle and chug, chug, chug. I heard about it around the same time I found out I was pregnant, which is when I realized that I was no longer only endangering myself by avoiding water as if it were the plague, but I was also endangering a tiny unborn baby who really, really needed that water. So, with admittedly low expectations for myself, I decided to test it out.

After a few weeks, I found myself pleasantly surprised. It’s really simple to set up: the water bottle includes a sensor that works hand-in-hand with an app, which takes your information and sets a daily water goal for you, tracks your water intake, and sends you reminders to keep drinking.

The notifications are especially helpful. Throughout the day, the bottle glows when you need to drink, and the app also sends cute little messages to your phone (like, “sip, sip, baby”). Fully aware of my own ability to ignore any water bottle sitting in front of me, I signed up for the maximum amount of notifications, which did their job of guilting me into drinking.

As the days went by, I found myself meeting my daily goal, and sometimes even exceeding it, over and over again. I was doing it -- I was drinking water like a normal person! I felt unreasonably proud of myself (and I also had to pee literally every five minutes). The bottle holds so much water that it makes refilling easy, and I began competing with myself: I would look at how much water I had drank the day before, and try to drink the same amount, if not a little bit more. And on the days when I didn’t drink enough water, I still couldn’t ignore the reminders, which shamed me into drinking more, even if it wasn’t exactly enough. Basically, the Hidrate Spark was making me much more aware of my own health.

There are other pros to the bottle as well. It’s BPA free, which is always a plus in my book, and it’s actually dishwasher-safe, which cannot be said about a lot of other water bottles. I also love that it uses a battery you don’t need to charge every day (I have no patience to charge anything that isn’t my iPhone). The bottle itself is sleek, lightweight, and easy to carry around. If I had to change one thing, it would be that the bottle was more insulated and kept water colder, but overall, I can’t really complain about the only thing that has ever gotten me to drink more water.

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