Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: The Brain-Bladder Connection

Episode Date: December 26, 2018

How much do you know about the brain-bladder connection? In about 15 minutes, it'll be a lot more.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca.

Hey, and welcome to the Shorty Short Stuff, you short short guy, short guys and gals. Everybody's so short because this is short stuff, including us, Josh, Chuck, Jerry, we're all short. Are you going to make that same similar type joke on all of these? That's no joke, Chuck. You know what Randy Newman said about short people? What? I got no reason to live.

What? Remember? What? That's a great song? No, that just took like such a left turn. I was not expecting that. Shalt people got no reason. Really?

Oh man, that was a top 10 hit, my friend. You're a crazy win. I'm telling you. I mean, I had to be the 70s. Okay. Look it up. The only top 10 hit of his that I know is, I love LA. We love it.

That's a great song. It sure is. All right. So let me ask you something. Have you ever gone home and felt just like, all right, I'm having a good day. I'm home. This is great. Sure.

Put the key in the door. And as soon as you start that process, you're like, oh, God, I have to pee. Really, really bad. I cannot express to you how many times this happens to me. For real. So you have this? Yeah. Clearly.

And I noticed that it mostly affects women. I'm like, oh, whatever. But I definitely have it big time so much so that I've trained myself because there's clearly something going on with the brain where I'm like, oh, I have so much further before I could possibly pee. So it's not happening in the next like 10 seconds for sure. So might as well just calm down there, bladder. And it actually works.

Yeah. So that is a real thing called key in lock syndrome or urge urinary incontinence. And like you said, it apparently does affect more women than men. And if you really have this to a decent to large degree, you kind of have to plan around it even. Yeah. So I didn't understand this. Now I totally get like those poise ads and depends ads like I get it now.

Apparently as women age, they tend to become slightly more incontinent, right? But it's not, like you said, it's not strictly women. I think a quarter to a third of all Americans at any given point in time have some sort of incontinence problem, not just this one. But if you start to understand what's behind it, it actually makes a lot more sense. But basically you have what's called the floor of your pelvic muscle. Your pelvic muscle or your pelvic floor is basically what it is. And that is what holds your guts and everything up.

It supports basically everything inside your abdomen. And it's like a trampoline of muscle that all that stuff sits in and it has a few holes in it. It has one for your urethra, one for your anus. And then if you're a woman, it has one for your vagina too, right? So normally that muscle is pretty tight and it's holding all that stuff closed. And then when you need to pee or poop or something, your brain's like, all right, open up, you're going number one, you're going number two, here comes a baby, that kind of thing, right?

And over time, this muscle can kind of get weaker, get looser once you have a child that can really stretch your muscles out. And so as a result of this, it's harder to hold in pee, especially if you get a sudden urge to go. Yeah, and like you said, as you age, this can increase. One of the reasons I think it primarily affects women is because childbirth and pregnancy can play a pretty big role in this. And interestingly, that's the same as for C-section as just a good old-fashioned vaginal birth.

That's really weird. Yeah, because I would think it has to do with, I don't know, I guess the C-section. And I think there's pressure, no matter what, during pregnancy. But it does say that childbirth, even a C-section, they're impacted. Well, yeah, then it must just be for the whole pregnancy. Just the baby sitting on that trampoline of muscle, it's got to stretch it out a little bit. Down to up and down.

For sure, yeah, it's like settled down there, junior. All moms say while they're pregnant. So pregnancy, childbirth, age, some other little more serious causes, although they're not as common as those are like infection or bladder cancer, bladder stones for men, prostate problems. Right, which I didn't, did you know what the prostate does? Do I know what the prostate does? That's my question that's out there on the table right now.

I do, but I don't know right now. Okay, I'll tell you. I knew at one point. So you know semen? I'm sure, well-acquainted. All right, so you know like the sperm that's in semen? Are you sure? Uh-huh.

You know the other stuff that's in semen? That's made by your prostate. And women have something too called the skeins gland, and it makes up basically that for women. Okay. So semen minus the sperm. So your prostate and your skeins gland are male and female stuff-makers, I think is what it's called.

Boy, we're dancing around this one. For sure. But so the prostate, and I didn't see it anywhere, but I would guess if the skeins gland is affected too, it could have an impact on incontinence for sure. But also medicines, two different kinds of medications can make you pee yourself? Well yeah. And that's the thing too, like a lot of times they don't necessarily come in and say, it's this one thing that's causing it.

So a lot of researchers now think maybe it can be a combination of things, it's not just the bladder. Yeah. There's clearly a brain connection because you can tell your brain, no, it's not time, settle down, and your brain will be like, oh sorry, false alarm, just wait a little longer to your bladder. Well, unless you've crossed that threshold, then there's no turning back. And then it's just like.

I wonder what that's all about actually, the threshold where you're like, no, no, no, there is no bringing it back. I don't know. Like I'm about to pee my pants if I don't find a bathroom. Because really other than having to take a shower afterward, all your breaking is like decorum. Sure. And I think what it is is your brain's weighing the violation of decorum versus the horrible

feeling that it's having to endure and it's just like, I'm going with this one. So long decorum. But it's enough of an embarrassing problem that people do seek treatment, but unfortunately from what I understand and from what the article that you sent says, is that there's real like low level attention paid to solving this, but luckily there's kind of like this rising school of thought that's like, no, we need to study this more. This is not enough. You can't just tell women to go do kegel exercises and don't worry about it or that they have

to wear poise pads for the rest of their life. That's not a solution. That's not an answer. So let's take a break and we'll come back and talk about what you can do when you're about to pee yourself because you are opening your door. Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn?

So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so the bladder, I'm curious, we should maybe do a full one on the bladder

at some point because it's really interesting to me. I've always been a person that I feel like I pee more than your average person. Me too. You definitely do. One of the reasons why yours is for one reason is because you have a constant flow of liquids coming into your body. Not just liquids, but coffee too, Chuck, which is a diuretic. Yeah.

Well, caffeine is. Yeah. Emily also is a frequent urinator. And I've always just suspected that it's not like people say I have a small bladder. I don't know if that's true or not. I think it's not so much the size of the bladder, but maybe how it relates to the brain. That's kind of what it seems to be the prevailing wisdom that's developing now is that there's something going on with the brain bladder connection.

Yeah. So that's what happens when you need to, when everything's going great, the bladder sends a signal to the brain and says, hey, brain, you might want to find a, might want to get this meat bag to a toilet soon because I have to release and it's going to happen at some point no matter what. I mean, there also seems to be possibly some connection to vasopressin because the brain floods the bladder with vasopressin to keep it from peeing while you're sleeping as a child as you're developing and you're not peeing the bed any longer.

That's because your vasopressin levels are rising throughout your lifetime. And I wonder if they start to go down after you age and that actually has an impact on it as well. Maybe so. It's possible, Chuck. So all right, your brain gets this signal that your bladder says it's full. If you're a dude, you can run to the urinal, which I would love to have one of those in my house, by the way, but Emily said no way.

No. She was like, you live in a house full of women. We're not building a urinal for you. Well, you're like, we can have both one right next to each other. So you run to the urinal and when you get there, your brain sends a signal back that says, all right, we're here, release the urine. Or if you can't get to a urinal or a bathroom, your brain says, sorry, bladder, but you're going to have to hang in there for a bit.

Yeah. That's it. That's peeing. Yeah, pretty much. Do you remember we talked about mixturition syncope and I called it syncope? What was that? It's where you faint after you pee. Oh, right, right.

Because they think there's like changes in your level of either vasopressin or norepinephrine or some chemical that tells your muscles to relax around your bladder causes you to faint. So what can you do? You can do kegels. If you're a woman or a man, you could basically, I think from what I understand, the first thing you want to do is go to your doctor. And this specialist, his name was Dr. Phillip P. Smith. And he's one of these new thinkers about this kind of thing.

And he said, if your doctor tells you to do kegels or get used to wearing pads, get yourself another doctor. Go see somebody else because there's other stuff you can do. But if your doctor's worth their salt, they're going to say things like, yes, do kegels. Try to follow a, basically a pee regimen. Yeah, schedule. Yes. So I didn't realize this and this person had like the greatest quote.

We have all heard that voiding on a schedule rather than just when you have to go is better. I had never heard that. I had neither. I think the specialist needs to get out of the clinic once in a while. I remember when my dad sat me down when I was 10 and said, you know what's on? You pee at nine, noon, three, seven and 10 and everything will be great. That's supposedly what you want to do is go every three hours, whether you have the urge or not and you're training your body to be able to hold it.

And then paradoxically, you want to hold it for an extra five minutes, then maybe an extra 10 minutes because as this article says it, and I've heard the opposite, stretching your bladder actually allows it to hold more. So you'll have the urgency less frequently over the day, but I don't know about that one. I'm not, I'm not banking on it. Did you ever go to one of those dumb college bars that had the thing where beer is free until you pee?

No. Yeah, it was a thing at some bars from like five to seven, beer was free for everybody until the first person in the bar peed. That's a lot of stress. And so of course there's always, you know, some stupid frat boy peeing in a beer pitcher under the table, just so we can drink a little more. Where was this? I mean, we both went to college in the same town.

I don't, I don't think, I think they had them at Georgia Southern. I never, I never went to one in Athens because I wouldn't have wanted that pressure because I would have been like, I got to pee guys. Yeah. Enough said with Georgia Southern. Yeah. So train your bladder. If you have to pee, try and stave it off even longer, five minutes at a time, then maybe

10 minutes. And before you know it, you get to that front door and you're just fine. You're just going to poop yourself, which is a whole other short stuff episode altogether. That's right. And that's it. If you want to get in touch with us, you can go to our website. It's called stuffyshadow.com. You can find all of our social links there and you can also send us an email.

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