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Chapter 1: Is it harmful to hold in your pee?
Is it bad to hold in your pee? Thanks for asking. I'm sure you can imagine a few scenarios in which you resisted the need to pee in the past. Maybe the toilets were unclean or closed. Sometimes you just feel like you need a little more privacy. Like when you're at work, for example. Now, there are several factors which influence the number of times we pee over the course of a day.
These include age, bladder size, the weather, medication, what we drink, and the amount we drink, for example. Pregnant women also tend to pee more often. On average, though, we go to the toilet between four and seven times a day. How do you explain that some of us need to pee very frequently and others not? The capacity of an adult's bladder is between 400 and 700 millilitres.
The bladder is a large muscular pouch located in the lower abdomen. Needing to pee very frequently can simply be due to drinking a lot of fluids, more than two litres per day. If you do so, your body may retain water less effectively, which can make you even thirstier, and create a vicious cycle that leads to peeing out more than 2 litres of urine in 24 hours.
Having a urinary tract infection can also disrupt the frequency of our bathroom visits. Most of the time it's caused by bacteria which are naturally present in our digestive tract. They can enter the urethra and travel up to the bladder. Cystitis or urinary tract infections can lead to more frequent peeing. Or conversely, less frequent peeing if you feel pain and burning, for example.
Sometimes there are other symptoms too, like bloody, strong smelling or cloudy urine, fever and back pain. Technically it can, although it's pretty rare. But holding in urine still isn't a good idea. In the long term, it can cause urinary incontinence or kidney problems such as stones.
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Chapter 2: What factors influence how often we need to urinate?
Moreover, it can lead to the bladder muscle narrowing. If you hold your pee in too much, you may even gradually become unable to pee normally due to the muscle being weakened by hours of pressure without relief. On the other hand, the bladder can sometimes become overactive due to constantly exercising the muscle by holding in urine.
When that happens, a person gets very frequent urges to pee, even when their bladder isn't full. What should you do when you have difficulty holding in? You'll need to see your GP. According to the Mayo Clinic, there are a few different types of urinary incontinence. These include stress incontinence, urge incontinence, overflow incontinence, and functional incontinence.
When a person has more than one type of incontinence, it's referred to as mixed incontinence. In order to establish which type of incontinence you have and recommend appropriate treatment, your GP may ask you to keep a bladder diary or to undergo tests. There you have it.
Now you know whether it's bad to hold in your pee. In under three minutes, we answer your questions and help you understand the true meaning behind the trends, concepts and acronyms that are making headlines. Listen along and you will really know for sure.