Treating and eliminating incontinence can be really counter intuitive sometimes. With good reason, people always think that their pelvic floor muscles must be weak if they have stress incontinence. Remember, stress incontinence is leakage associated with coughing, sneezing, running, lifting, jumping, or any other increase in intra-abdominal pressure. In actuality, most people who have stress incontinence are not weak, their muscles are overactive or their brain does not know how to communicate (check out this post to learn more about this “phenomenon”).

When it comes to urge incontinence, it seems like a good idea to rush to the bathroom every time you feel the slightest urge. That way those urges won’t get any stronger, and you won’t leak urine. This seems like a great way to manage symptoms, but it doesn’t work that way. If you pee every time you feel a slight urge, then your body thinks you will continue to do that. Your urges will only get more frequent and more urgent. In order to stop urge incontinence, you have to ignore some of those urges to spread out your bathroom breaks and train your bladder to hold for longer intervals and larger volumes.

When you feel an urge too soon, see if you can get it to pass by following these four steps

1. Stop what you are doing

2. Think about something else

3. Take a few deep breaths

4. Contract your pelvic floor muscles 5 times

You should be able to use this four step technique to suppress some of your urges. Then you can work on spreading out bathroom breaks and calming down strong urges so that you can walk, not run, to the bathroom.

The process I use to help my clients retrain their bladders has more steps than this (I can’t give away all my secrets), but this is a good place to get started and to realize that you really can regain control over your bladder.