What Are Your Bladder Habits?

By Molly Gittings PT, DPT, OCS 

What are Your Bladder Habits?

What’s Normal:

• Emptying your bladder 5-8 times per day (average frequency if every 2-4 hours)
• Waking 0-1 times per night to use the restroom
• Averaging a total of 45-60 oz of urine/day and 8-18 oz per trip
• No leaking of urine outside of bathroom trips

Potential Bad Habits:

• Do you pee “just-in-case” before car trips or because you got up to feed the baby in the middle of the night so “might as well”?
  • This can lead to poor urinary habits and altered sensations of fullness in the bladder and create dysfunction over time
• Do you hold your bladder too long?
  • Teachers, nurses, and those with limited access to the bathroom may get in the habit of holding bladder for multiple hours of the day
  • Allowing the bladder to overfill on a regular basis will limit the bladder’s ability to fully empty over time
• Do you hover over public toilet seats?
  • Fun fact: did you know you are more likely to catch something from shaking hands with someone vs sitting on a public toilet?
  • If we don’t fully sit when urinating, we get in the bad habit of not fully relaxing our pelvic floor muscles
• Do you limit how much water you drink to limit how often you need to urinate?
  • Unfortunately this works against you due to the concentrated urine in your bladder and will often lead to increased sensation to urinate
• Have you attempting to stop the flow of urine while urinating?
  • This has often been used as an example of how to strengthen your pelvic floor, but performing this regularly is BAD for your bladder and can increase your chances of a UTI

Do any of these sound like you? Come chat with Molly today to learn about ways to change these bad habits and prevent long term dysfunction!