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!