Ten tips to keep your bladder healthy
Do you find yourself rushing to the loo several times a day or ‘leaking’ every time you sneeze? Many of us have bladder problems, and as you get older, they’re more likely to affect you. But, while common, some bladder problems can be preventable.
Here, I’ll look at some of the most common bladder problems and share my top 10 tips for keeping your bladder healthy.
What are common bladder problems?
Types of incontinence (when you leak urine) and bladder infections are examples of bladder problems. The most common bladder problems include the following.
- Stress incontinence – you leak urine when you sneeze, cough, or have other sudden pressure on your bladder.
- Overactive bladder – you have a strong urge to pee frequently, including at night. When this causes you to leak urine, it’s known as urge incontinence.
- Overflow incontinence – when a blockage or problem with your bladder muscles means your bladder doesn’t empty properly. This can lead to leaking urine. It can also cause other problems, like bladder stones.
- Nocturnal polyuria – your body makes more urine than normal during the night. This means that you may need to keep getting up at night to pee.
- Cystitis – a urinary tract infection (UTI) that affects your bladder. If you have cystitis, it may hurt or burn when you pee. You may need to pee more often than usual too.
- Interstitial cystitis (or painful bladder syndrome) – a condition causing pain in your bladder area. You’ll also have other symptoms, like needing to pee often.
Why do bladder problems increase as you age?
We know that people get more problems with their bladder as they get older, but why is that? Natural changes that happen in your body as you age – like muscles in your pelvis weakening – make all types of incontinence more likely.
You’re also more likely to have other health issues and conditions, which can affect your bladder. For example, if you have a prostate gland, this can become enlarged as you age and cause bladder problems.
Your risk of bladder infections also increases as you get older. This may be linked to incontinence and not being able to empty your bladder fully. Changes in hormone levels that happen during menopause can also increase the risk of UTIs.
How do you keep your bladder healthy?
Here’s a list of 10 things you can do to help keep your bladder healthy.
- Keep hydrated. You don’t want to drink too much – this can contribute to incontinence and needing to pee overnight. But also don’t try to limit your fluid intake, as this may increase risk of a urinary tract infection.
- Limit your intake of caffeine, fizzy drinks, and alcohol. These drinks may make you want to pee more often and more urgently.
- Maintain a healthy weight and lose excess weight when needed. This can help to prevent incontinence.
- Practise pelvic floor exercises. Pelvic floor muscle exercises may help with incontinence. To do these, you tighten the muscles around your back passage and genitals and hold it for up to 10 seconds. It should feel as if you’re trying to stop passing wind and urine. A doctor or physiotherapist can give you more advice.
- If you smoke, it’s a good idea to give up smoking. Smoking can increase the risk of incontinence.
- Reduce constipation by making sure you follow a healthy diet with plenty of fruit, vegetables, and wholegrains. This can help to prevent stress incontinence.
- Go to the toilet as soon you need to pee – don’t try to hold on. If you delay, it can increase the risk of infection and incontinence.
- Wipe from front to back after a poo, if you have female sex organs. This avoids spreading bacteria from your back passage to your urethra, which could cause an infection.
- Go for a pee and try to empty your bladder as soon as possible after having sex. This can help to prevent infections.
- If you have a vagina, avoid using products such as wipes or deodorants around your genital area, and don’t ‘douche’ (wash out your vagina). This prevents washing away ‘good’ bacteria, which helps to prevent infection.
When should I seek professional help?
You can try some of the measures in the section above to help reduce incontinence. But also talk to your doctor to arrange assessment.
Bladder infections will often clear up on their own without medical treatment. You can help yourself by drinking plenty of fluids and taking regular painkillers. But see a doctor if your symptoms aren’t improving within 48 hours, or they start to get worse.
Seek help for a bladder infection straight away if you’re pregnant, have a long-term health condition or a weakened immune system.
And if you have blood in your pee, it’s important to contact a doctor straight away.
Remember: you don’t need to suffer in silence with bladder problems. Although they may be more likely as you get older, they’re not just a normal part of ageing. There’s lots you can do to help prevent problems, and deal with them when they happen.
Speaker 1: Dr Zoe Williams
Welcome to Inside Health where we help you get under the skin of some of the big health concerns that affect us all.
Today we're shining a light on bladder health.
So we're gonna be talking about some of the common bladder conditions, giving you some top tips on how to manage your pelvic floor and answering some of your questions.
Speaker 2: Dr Elizabeth Rogers
Urinary incontinence is essentially the involuntary leakage of urine.
So by that I mean you basically go for a wee when you don't want to or you don't intend to.
Dr Zoe Williams:
So what are some of the typical causes then of urinary incontinence?
Dr Elizabeth Rogers:
So the causes depend on which type of incontinence you've got.
And often we don't find one single cause, so it tends to be kind of multifactorial.
If we think about stress incontinence, so this is the kind where you leak a bit of urine when you either cough or sneeze or exert yourself, we need to have a bit of a think about the structures involved when you need to urinate.
So we've probably all heard of our pelvic floor. So a group of structures and muscles that basically help control the flow of urine out of the bladder.
Anything that either weakens or damages these muscles can lead to incontinence.
So, you might think about things like pregnancy, having a vaginal birth, having a forceps delivery for example, can damage the pelvic floor, having constipation, so you're constipation where you're having to strain a lot, or having a chronic cough where you are coughing all the time. So those can all be causes.
Dr Zoe Williams:
Commonly we think of it at affecting women more.
But tell us some of the reasons why it might impact on men.
Dr Elizabeth Rogers:
Yeah, so men do also have a pelvic floor as well, so ensuring that they've got a strong pelvic floor, avoiding things like a chronic cough and constipation are really important.
Our anatomical makeup is of course slightly different.
So in men you've got the prostate gland and that sits just below the bladder. And urine comes out of the bladder through a tube called the urethra and that passes through the middle of the prostate gland.
And if there are changes in the prostate gland, such as it getting larger, that can press on that tube, it can affect the way that urine flows out of your bladder.
So, it can cause problems such as weak stream and it makes it harder for men to go to the toilet.
But for many men they also get problems kind of with urge incontinence and urgency and feeling like they need to go to the loo then and there. Or that they need to go to the toilet really frequently.
Dr Zoe Williams:
When it comes to bladder health one of the most important things for us to talk about is how to train your pelvic floor.
I think looking after your pelvic floor is one of the best ways that we can prevent issues like incontinence in the future, but it also forms a really important part of the treatment plan if people are having issues like incontinence.
Firstly, I think it's important to identify what the pelvic floor is.
It's a structure that's deep in the pelvis that's made up of muscles and connective tissue and you can kind of think of it as a trampoline that attaches at the front on the pubic bone, at the back, on the tailbone and either side on the seat bones.
And you want that trampoline to be firm and strong, but have a little bit of give, like a good trampoline. On top of that trampoline sits your bladder, your womb, if you're a woman, and your bowels. And there are some holes in it and these holes allow you to pee and poo.
When you jump up and down, for example, or cough or sneeze, those muscles give a little bit of tension to maintain control of the bowels and the bladder.
So what I'm gonna do next is I'm gonna describe exactly how to do a pelvic floor exercise. It's a bit complicated, so I'm gonna do it in a stepwise approach and I'm gonna do it with you. So I want you to follow along with what I do.
Pelvic floor exercise
Okay, first of all, just go with me on this.
Imagine you need to fart, but you're in a busy lift and you need to hold onto it, so just imagine that.
And what I want you to do now is hold onto the fart.
So the muscles you're using are part of the pelvic floor, relax them, now what I want you to do is do that again.
Imagine you're gonna fart, hold onto it and pull those muscles up inside and hold onto them.
Well done, that's the first bit.
The next bit is imagine you're having a pee and somebody's walking in the room and you don't want them to know you're there, so you need to stop midway through.
So imagine you're having a pee, hold onto it, stop it and relax.
We'll do that one again.
So imagine you're having a pee, stop it.
Pull those muscles up inside, squeeze and relax.
So now you've got all the different components.
We're gonna put it all together to do one exercise.
So first of all, imagine you need to fart, hold onto it, draw it up inside, imagine you need to pee, hold onto it, draw it up inside, you should relax your buttock, relax your legs.
It should be just the muscles inside.
Squeeze for as long as you can and then relax.
You'll only be able to hold onto it for one to two seconds at the start, but that will get longer as you progress.
So you just did one exercise, well done.
You do eight of those three times a day and that is the ideal workout for your pelvic floor.
Dr Zoe Williams to Dr Elizabeth Rogers:
I think at this stage probably what people really wanna know is what can they actually do?
And there is lots of things that they can do.
So what are your top tips and advice for how people can manage these symptoms if they are having them?
Dr Elizabeth Rogers:
As you demonstrated earlier, Zoe, pelvic floor exercise is really important.
Reducing caffeine intake is a really good place to start.
So caffeine irritates the bladder and not only that, it's what we call a diuretic and by that what I mean is it encourages your body to produce more urine.
So it's got a real double whammy effect there.
Coffee tends to be the biggest culprit.
However, there are other caffeine containing drinks such as fizzy drinks, tea and hot chocolate and even chocolate itself.
And in fact, some cold and flu relief medications have caffeine as well, so it's worth being aware of that.
If you're overweight, trying to lose some weight can help. It reduces the pressure on your pelvic floor.
And making healthy lifestyle choices such as reducing your alcohol intake.
And if you're a smoker, now is a really good time to think about quitting smoking.
In some cases if that's not working, your GP might consider referring you on rather for some further input with a physiotherapist or a continence advisor and what they do is something called bladder retraining.
And it's basically a way of helping you regain control over your bladder.
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Sources Sources
- Incontinence - urinary in women. NICE Clinical Knowledge Summaries. cks.nice.org.uk, last revised October 2019
- LUTS in men. NICE Clinical Knowledge Summaries. cks.nice.org.uk, last revised March 2019
- Urinary tract infection in adults. Patient. patient.info, last edited 19 January 2022
- Urinary incontinence. Patient. patient.info, last edited 22 May 2019
- Nocturnal polyuria (passing too much urine at night). The British Association of Urological Surgeons. www.baus.org.uk, published June 2020
- Urinary tract infection (lower) - women. NICE Clinical Knowledge Summaries. cks.nice.org.uk, last revised February 2023
- Interstitial cystitis/painful bladder syndrome. Patient. patient.info, last edited 22 June 2021
- Self-help information for women with recurrent cystitis. The British Association of Urological Surgeons. www.baus.org.uk, published June 2020
- Benign prostatic hyperplasia. Patient. patient.info, last edited 28 June 2021
- Urinary tract infections in women. BMJ Best Practice. bestpractice.bmj.com, last reviewed 3 February 2023
- Pelvic floor exercises. Chartered Society of Physiotherapists. www.csp.org.uk, last reviewed 25 October 2021
- Constipation. NICE Clinical Knowledge Summaries. cks.nice.org.uk, last revised January 2023
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