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When you gotta go, you gotta go, and by "go", I mean relieve yourself, you know, of urine.
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But sometimes⏤and we’ve all done this⏤you’ll hold your pee to finish one more email, or so you don’t miss the end of a movie, or just because you’re too lazy to walk to the bathroom from the couch.
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You’ve probably heard people say that that’s bad for you. And it is!
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But only if you do it frequently and for a really long time, and it almost always isn’t life-threatening.
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If you’re an adult, your bladder can hold up to about half a liter, or two full cups of pee, before you’ll feel the need to... let it go, as Elsa might say.
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Your bladder wall is lined with receptors that can measure how full your bladder is, and when it’s reached capacity, these receptors send your brain a signal that it’s time to hit the can.
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Most adults have control over their bathroom urges, meaning you can choose to pee right away after receiving these signals, or to hold it for a bit if you’re not near facilities.
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If you do decide to hold it, the cylindrical sphincters in your bladder close up tightly to keep all of the urine from leaking through your urethra.
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But if you hold it in for long periods of time a lot, like if you’re a trucker who’s on the road for hours on end, for years, then you might find yourself facing some not-so-fun long-term effects, like urinary retention and increased risk of infection.
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Urinary retention is the inability to empty your bladder completely.
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Constantly holding in your pee can weaken your bladder muscles, which can be the cause of urinary retention as you age.
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Your bladder can also become a breeding ground for bacteria if it’s constantly holding large amounts of urine, which slightly increases your chances of getting a bladder or urinary tract infection.
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Which sounds bad enough, but what if you held it in for longer?
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Think about Tycho Brahe, the 16th-century astronomer who supposedly died from a bladder that burst after he held his pee for too long.
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Well, long before you get anywhere near your bladder bursting, odds are your body will ignore your brain's attempts to hold in the pee, and you’ll just wet yourself; however, in certain very rare, very extreme cases, bladders do burst.
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When this happens, it’s almost always in people who already had a damaged bladder, like from a pelvic injury, though there are a few reports of bladders bursting in people who seemed perfectly fine before.
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In those cases, it’s generally because the person was drinking a lot, and the alcohol dampened the signal to their brains that was telling them they needed to pee, like right now.
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But again, it’s incredibly rare.
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So, if you do hold your pee in a few hours longer than you should, probably nothing super terrible will happen⏤unless you consider wetting yourself in public super terrible.
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Totally understandable if you do!
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