5 Tips for Dealing with Urge Incontinence

Urge incontinence is the sudden, intense urge to urinate before your bladder is actually full. This can affect anyone of any age or gender, but we see it often with women who have delivered children. Urge incontinence may or may not involve actual leaking, but will feel like you are about to pee your pants. Often times this will accompany a specific situation, like coming home and unlocking your front door, or hearing water running. Or you may just feel like you have a “tiny bladder” and always have to pee. At the end of the day, urge incontinence is a brain - bladder connection issue, where the bladder is sending the signal that it’s time to empty before it’s truly full.

Steps for Dealing with Urge Incontinence:

1. Measure Your Pee

   Sounds weird, we know. But the first step in determining how to deal with urge incontinence is understanding if that’s actually what you’re dealing with. When you have the urge to urinate, your bladder should contain about 1.5-2 cups of pee (about 350-475mL). If you are feeling that you need to go before this, you may be dealing with urge incontinence. Take a paper cup and pre-measure 1.5-2 cups. Next time you go, fill the cup and see where you end up. If it’s less than 1.5 cups, check out the next steps!

2. Stop the “just in case” pee

   We've all done the “I’m getting in the car for 4 hours and going to make myself go so I don’t have to stop” pee, but if you’re making a habit of this anytime you leave the house or go into a meeting, it might be a good idea to ditch that. Regularly going before you’re bladder is full can actually train your bladder to signal that it’s emptying time long before it needs to.

3. Identify potential irritants

   Things like caffeine, carbonation, alcohol, and chocolate can irritate the bladder and cause that faulty signal that the bladder needs to empty. The only way to know for sure is tracking your symptoms with a food/drink journal and trying to connect symptoms with certain foods or drinks.

4. Distraction Techniques

   The best treatment for managing urge incontinence is retraining the brain. There are a number of techniques for this, so try a few to see what works for you:

   1. Pelvic floor quick contractions - contract and release 15 times and see if the urge dissipates.

   2. Count backwards from 100 - if you mess up, even better. The idea is to get the brain focused on something else.

   3. Delay going 5 min each time you feel the need to go. Obviously don’t pee your pants, but try setting a timer for 5 min when you feel the urge. Doing this each time will train your bladder to calm that signal down.

   4. If there's a specific setting that sparks the need to pee (for me it’s opening the front door), try faking your brain out. Put the key in the lock, and then take a step back. Do this in combination with another distraction technique if you need to. Pretend the open the door a few times before you do, to keep your brain from associating this action with immediately needing to pee.

5. Deep breathing or meditation

   Urge incontinence can be associated with stress and anxiety, and finding ways to down-regulate the nervous system can be helpful. Try different breathing techniques or meditation in order to destress, and see if that calms your bladder down too.

   If you’re struggling with any form of incontinence and need some help, shoot us a message!