My Urinary Incontinence Is Frustrating: What Can Help?

You’re out with friends, and you sneeze and, sure enough, you can feel that little bit of urine leak out. Or, perhaps you’re dealing with an overactive bladder that’s sending you running to the bathroom far too frequently.

Whatever the case, your bladder and you aren’t on the best of terms, and you want to find solutions for your urinary incontinence. Millions of women share this goal — about half of women experience urinary incontinence in their lives.

At Women’s Wellness MD, Dr. Chetanna Okasi and the team have experience helping women navigate the frustrating and embarrassing world of urinary incontinence and bladder issues. Based on this experience, here’s what we want you to know about urinary incontinence.

Why are women more prone to incontinence?

Both men and women can run into incontinence problems. However, the issue strikes women far more than men, which is largely due to significant reproductive events in a woman’s life, including:

Pregnancy
Childbirth
Menopause

Naturally, aging plays a key role and can start to level the playing field when it comes to the gender disparity, as both men and women run into more issues with bladder control as they age.

Still, the female-specific events mentioned above account for a large part of the overall burden.

Types of urinary incontinence

There are different types of urinary incontinence, but we highlight the three most common in women, which include:

Stress incontinence — pressure on your bladder leads to leakage
Urge incontinence or overactive bladder — you feel a frequent urge to pee, even if you’ve already gone
Mixed incontinence — a combination of stress and urge incontinence

To give you an idea about how these can develop, let’s use the example of pregnancy and childbirth. Obviously, a growing fetus during pregnancy can place more pressure on your pelvic floor and on your bladder, so temporary stress incontinence is perfectly normal.

Unfortunately, many women are left with lingering incontinence issues after childbirth, which can damage the nerves that control their bladder and further weaken their pelvic floor. As a result, women can develop mixed incontinence.

Or, let’s look at menopause — the loss of estrogen leads to weakness in your pelvic floor, urethra, and bladder, all of which can create issues with incontinence.

Fighting back against incontinence

You may notice we mention the pelvic floor in the context of urinary incontinence, so that’s always a good place to start when it comes to improving your bladder control.

To re-strengthen your pelvic floor so that it better supports your bladder, we recommend daily Kegel exercises. You can watch this tutorial on how to perform these quick and easy exercises.

Other treatments for urinary incontinence include: