Intake of fluids is one of the natural ways for your body to keep it hydrated. Water and other fluids are very important, considering that they maintain balance and keep you healthy. However, you also need to excrete a portion of these fluids along with other toxins in the body. There are a lot of ways a human can excrete fluids, which are usually through tears, sweat and urine. Among these, urination is one of the most common excretions. Urine is just a waste product. Both of your kidneys filter wastes, then, they send it to two small ureters, which is further passed down to your bladder for excretion. Once your bladder is full, you will feel the urge to urinate. This is exactly how the urination process works. While studying about this, we came across a very common question, which was – how often should you pee or how often should I pee? Read further to know the answer.
How Often Should You Pee?
Since urination is something we often do in our day to day lives, many people wonder as to how often should a human urinate? because excess urination might signify a serious medical issue. The answer to this question is given below:
Normally, a person urinates 7-8 times within 24 hours. But there are a lot of things that can affect urination. Hence, a range of 4 to 10 is highly acceptable.
The question — how often should you pee actually depends on the volume of your fluid intake for the day, the type of fluids you take, age, medications taken, and underlying existing medical conditions like high blood pressure. These factors generally affect the number of times you pee considering that no one is similar on these aspects… probably similar but very rarely alike.
7 Factors That Can Affect The Number Of Times You Urinate
Here are in-depth views on the different factors that can affect your urination:
1. Volume And Types Of Fluid Being Taken
If you take an over abundance of fluid, your bladder will feel full faster than necessary which will increase the number of times you have the urge to urinate. The type of fluids being taken also affects the frequency of urination. If you drink more water, you can expect more frequent urinations compared to having broths and soups. Same as when drinking alcoholic drinks (usually diuretics) compared to drinking fruit juices.
2. Age
We do not expect a child to have the same number of urination compared to adults, right? More so, the number of urination of older people compared to young adults also varies. Usually, children and older people have a slow system which makes their urination less frequent compared to adults.
3. Medications
Certain medicines can also affect urination frequency since there are few pills that can increase urinary output. Say for instance, diuretics. Diuretics are given to patients to help promote urinary frequency and ease passage of urine.
4. Bladder Size
The answer to the question how often should you pee also depends on your bladder size. Some people who have small bladders find themselves going to the bathroom more often compared to those who have bigger bladders.
5. Gender
The gender of a person also affects his or her urine frequency. Women tend to urinate more frequently than men because they have shorter ureters and their bladders tend to become full faster.
6. Foods And Beverages
When it comes to the question how often should I pee, what you eat also has a major role. There are several natural diuretics which can increase urination. Few examples of natural diuretics include celery, parsley, coffee and tea.
7. Existing Health Issue
Having an existing medical condition also affects how often a person urinates. These medical conditions include:
- Diabetes: Since the level of blood sugar is high in a person with diabetes, his or her kidney will work to compensate it and flush the excessive sugar from the body. In most cases, the urine of a diabetic person will also smell and taste sweet.
- Enlarged prostate: Since the prostate is enlarged, it presses down the urethra, which then instigates the feeling of a full bladder and leads to frequent urination.
- Intestinal cystitis: Frequent urination is the most common sign of this disease.
- Stroke and other neurological disorders: These damage your nerve involving the bladder. When such cases occur, it can increase or decrease the number of times you urinate. Most often though, it will cause a need for you to pee often than what you are already doing.
- Sexually transmitted diseases: These usually include herpes, gonorrhea, and Chlamydia. STDs are also one of the many reasons which cause the increase on the number of times you urinate. Some urination in STDs though, involves a painful and burning sensation when passing out urine.
- Pregnancy: Once you are pregnant and your trimester advances, there is an added pressure on your bladder. This extra pressure will increase urinary frequency as well.
- Menopause: Menopausal age of women is also a medical factor that affects the frequency of urination. During menopausal, women may experience an increase in number of urination.
- Kidney infections and problems: Since kidneys are important on excretion of waste products, as discussed earlier, a problem with your kidney may lead to kidney failure or even death. That is why it is very important to consult your doctor during this situation to ensure that you will still have a strong and healthy kidney.
Note: If you experience these signs and symptoms (bloody or cloudy urine, fever, back pain and frequent urination), it is better to consult your doctor as soon as possible so that necessary treatments can be made.
How Often Should You Pee At Night?
Peeing twice or thrice during the night is not a problem. If you have had too much water, beer or any beverage before your sleep, then you might want to get up a couple of times. If it’s winter then definitely peeing at night twice becomes common. Peeing at night is not really an issue, but, the problem is when the peeing at night is often and more than thrice.
When you are in to any medications or going through any medical conditions the night time peeing and day time peeing might vary. These medical issues can affect your night time peeing routine and can cause more peeing.
In medical terms, the night time urination is been called Nocturia. Set your body in to more relaxed state before you go to your sleep and avoid spicy foods/heavy meals and junk foods in the night time as they have profound unhealthy effect. Don’t take too much fluid before bed. Before you hit the bed, take a pee so that you don’t have to wake up in the middle very soon. Apart from that, night time peeing is usual and common among people.If still you pee more often in night times, then consulting a doctor can help sort issues that lead to Nocturia.
Nocturia: Frequent Urination At Night
If you find yourself waking up mid-sleep at night countless of times just to pee, you are definitely suffering from nocturia. Nocturia is the medical term for excessive urination during the night. You must take note, however, that nocturia is different from bed-wetting, which is medically coined as enuresis.
Nocturia, usually, causes adults to lose sleep at night considering that they are forced to wake up from bed and go to the comfort room just to release the urine. Most people can go to sleep for 6-8 hours even without urinating, however, it is also considered normal when you wake up once just to urinate. While 2-3 times urination at night can be linked to being tired during the day, the case of nocturia only happens if you wake up for 5 times or more just to urinate.
This is a problem not only because it disturbs your sleeping pattern but it is also a sign of medical conditions such as:
- Acute Infective Cystitis
- Alcoholic Cardiomyopathy
- Autonomic Dysrelexia (Hyperreflexia)
- Bed-wetting
- Bladder prolapsed
- Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD)
- Diabetes mellitus, or diabetes insipidus
- Disorders of the sphincter control
- Glucagonoma
- Heart and liver failure
- Hypercalcemia or high calcium
- Ischemic Cardiomyopathy
- Kidney failure
- Kidney stones
- Medullary Cystic Disease
- Membranous glomerulonephritis
- Menopause
- Night terrors
- Overactive bladder
- Polysystic kidney disease
- Prostate or bladder tumor
- Pyelonephritis or glomerulo nephritis
- Sleep apnea
- Transitional cell cancer (Malignant Neoplasm of Ureter)
- Urge incontinence
- Urinary Tract Infection (UTI)
- Urological infection
Other causes of nocturia that are not disease or illness related are:
- Digitalis toxicity
- Excessive drinking of water prior to sleeping
Nocturia usually occurs when people age, considering that the body’s system produce less anti-diuretic hormone that retains fluid. Since there is less production of such hormone, there is increased urination at night. Advanced age also causes the bladder to lose its holding capacity of urine which makes the bladder easily filled. Hence, the urgency of urinating.
When To Seek Professional Medical Help?
Once you think that you have a problem with your health since your urine pattern is not as normal as it should be, your health care provider might ask some of these questions which you should be ready to answer:
- How frequent is your urination every 24 hours?
- When did you begin to notice the change of your urine pattern?
- What is the amount or volume of urine each time you pee?
- Is there a huge difference from the amount of urine you had prior to experiencing this condition?
- Have you felt a sense of urgency to urinate?
- Did you ever have troubles initiating a pee?
- Do you feel a painful or burning sensation when you pee?
- How strong is your urine stream?
- Have you ever experience urine incontinence? (This is a condition wherein you don’t have the control over your urine and it just leaks without you knowing or intending to.)
- Is there blood in your urine?
- Do you take any medications both prescribed and unprescribed? If so, what are these meds?
- Do you have any medical histories such as high blood pressure, diabetes, or stroke among others?
Your doctor may ask you a lot more questions not listed above. It is of utmost importance that you answer your doctor’s questions as honestly and precisely as you can, bearing in mind that your history will serve as a basis to determine the severity of your condition and diagnose existing problems if there are any.
Treatments For Frequent Urination
There are a lot of treatments that you can do to help control your frequent urination. These treatments can be:
1. Re-Training Of The Bladder
When you were still a child, your parents had a potty-training for you, wherein you were trained to control your bowel. In this case, you are also tasked to do the same for your bladder. You will be required to hold your urine for a longer period of time than normal. You need to train yourself within 12 weeks and increase the interval as you go along with it. This training helps assist your bladder to hold out urine for a longer period and lessen urinary frequency.
2. Kegel Exercises
These exercises are really helpful when you want to control your urination. These involve contracting your pelvic floor muscles for a few seconds and then release it afterwards. While you are peeing, stop voluntarily in the middle of the flow and then resume again afterwards to help engage the muscles. This exercise will help you tone done your muscles, and when this happens you will lessen your urinary frequency.
3. Diet Alterations
As we discussed earlier, food plays an important part on your urination frequency as some food and drinks are natural diuretics. It is important that you take note what these food and drinks are, as to ensure that you will not be able to consume such to lower down your urine frequency.
4. Fluid Intake Monitoring
It is true enough that we are encouraged to drink as many fluids as we can to maintain hydration in our body as and to prevent constipation. However, always remember that too much of something is also considered bad. Hence, it is advisable that you do not over-do drinking fluids. Make sure that you drink as little as possible during night time to help minimize urination.
5. Medications
Since there are medications like diuretics that can increase urination, there are also medications that counter-attack the effects of diuretics. You may take these medications to help reduce your urine frequency. These medications include solifenacin, oxybutinin, mirabegron, darifenacin, impramine, trospium extended-release, tolterodine extended-release and oxybutinin skin patch.
6. Surgical Treatments
As always, surgeries are the last mode of treatment if every intervention fails. There are various types of surgeries that are available for excess urination problems. One surgery includes insertion of nerve stimulators under your skin which stimulates pelvic floor as well as control muscles and organs.
Urination is an important facet of our lives. Hence, we should not take it for granted. If there are some changes that you observe during your urination pattern, it is essential to consult a doctor as soon as possible because it might mean a more serious case. It is also advisable that you record your fluid intake, your urine pattern/time, and the amount of urine output you have so that you can use it as a basis of records someday if any problems arise.
