Is it bad to drink electrolytes every day?

Not dangerous for most people — just almost entirely pointless.

The premise of the whole category is that you are running low on electrolytes. You are not. 99.4% of US adults already exceed sodium recommendations, and there is no region on earth whose average intake falls below the WHO limit. Sodium-dominant electrolyte powders are selling you more of the one mineral you were already getting too much of.

Does the electrolyte drink actually hydrate you better than water?

In a narrow, mechanistic sense, yes — sodium helps you retain fluid, and that effect is real and replicated. But context destroys the practical claim:

• If you are already hydrated, a sports drink is indistinguishable from plain water.
• Water plus an ordinary meal beats a sports drink outright — because food already supplies sodium and potassium, in quantity.

So the retention effect is real, and irrelevant, unless you have actually lost a lot of fluid.

When it genuinely matters

Prolonged endurance work, serious heat, heavy sweating. That case is legitimate and always has been — it's just not what a desk-bound Tuesday looks like.

And a myth worth killing: electrolyte drinks do not prevent exercise-associated hyponatremia. That condition is caused by drinking too much fluid, not by losing salt. Sodium supplementation did nothing to prevent it even across a 12-hour Ironman.

The honest caveat

If any electrolyte deserves attention it is magnesium (a small but real blood-pressure effect) and potassium, which many people genuinely under-consume. Neither is what a sodium-heavy stick pack is mostly delivering.

Bottom line: drinking one daily probably won't hurt you. Eating normally and drinking water would have done the same job for free.