When you gotta go…and go…and go…
When it comes to peeing, how often is too often? Do you feel like you go and then 10, 30, 45 min later you have to go again? Are you scanning every building you enter for the bathroom? You don’t have a small bladder - you have urinary frequency!
The bladder can hold can hold 400 - 500 mL of fluid on average, that’s about 2 cups. Typically, we should be able to wait 3-4 hours between voids. There are a number of things that can cause us to have to urinate more frequently.
Bladder Irritants: These foods and drinks irritate the lining of the bladder and make your bladder say “get out!”
Alcohol, Caffeine, Carbonation
Artificial Sweeteners
Tomatoes, Citrus, Vinegar
Chocolate :(
Milk
Many more! This is not an exhaustive list but common offenders
Bladder Habits
If you go to the bathroom every time you feel the slightest urge or “just in case” before you leave the house, office, etc, you may be training your bladder not to fill. Remember, it can hold 500 mL! If you are voiding every time it is 100 or 200 mL full, it will decide it shouldn’t fill more than that. To retrain your bladder, allow it to fill past the initial sensation of needing to pee. Take some deep breaths, count backwards from 10 and see if the urge is still there. If not, move on! You can always come back. See if you can postpone voiding for until at least the 2 hour mark.
Pelvic Floor Tension
Your bladder sits right on top of your pelvic floor muscles. Those muscles should be like a trampoline, able to stretch and bounce back. This allows them to move as your bladder stretches. If your pelvic floor muscles are chronically tight they behave more like a cement floor than a trampoline. If your bladder is unable to stretch and expand, it may send you the message that you have to pee too soon. To relax the pelvic floor muscles, try taking slow, deep breaths. Allow your breath to fill your abdomen and pelvis to passively stretch the pelvic floor muscles. If you feel unable to relax your muscles, a pelvic health therapist might be able to help with that.
Stress
If you have ever done any public speaking or performing, you may have experienced the sudden need to pee right before you go on. This is because your sympathetic nervous system (fight, flight or freeze) revs up when there is stressful stimulus. This nervous system reaction can make you feel like you have to pee, even when your bladder isn’t full. So if you are often under a lot of stress, you may find yourself wanting to pee a lot. Managing stress can help calm this constant urge to pee. Getting good sleep, adequate physical activity, and a balanced diet are great places to start with stress reduction. Starting a mindfulness practices such as meditation or body scanning can also help manage chronic stress.