Overactive Bladder and Quality of Life: Strategies for Managing Daily Challenges
Struggling with overactive bladder symptoms in daily life? If yes, this article is for you. Our urologists recommend some strategies that help you manage the daily challenges of OAB (Overactive bladder) and improve your life quality. If you want to know more about bladder health, visit us at Doral Health and Wellness Urology Center and consult with the best nephrologists and urologists in East New York.
Strategies for Managing Daily Challenges of OAB
Here are some strategies you can use to manage the daily challenges of OAB, including:
1. Incorporating physical therapy:
Incorporating physical therapy for OAB can be greatly beneficial in improving your symptoms and overall bladder functionality. It includes:
• Muscle strengthening: The pelvic floor muscles are essential for bladder control function. If these muscles don’t work properly, the bladder is not able to fully empty and you develop the urge to pee again after you did it a short while ago. The pelvic floor also needs to be activated quickly to calm the bladder down if you get a new urge. To strengthen the pelvic muscles, you need to consult a physical therapist who’ll guide you about specific exercises that are designed to coordinate these muscles, improve their ability to support the bladder and manage urinary urgency.
• Bladder retraining: Incorporating bladder retraining techniques can help you improve your control over your bladder function. You need to slowly increase the time between bathroom visits and learn techniques to suppress urges. Patients can retrain their bladder to hold urine for a long time effectively. These techniques include urge deferment techniques or timed voiding.
• Posture and alignment: Poor posture and alignment are the most common factors that lead to pelvic floor dysfunction and worsen your OAB symptoms. Pelvic floor PT can address these problems and help to improve them with posture correction exercises, recommended for your home or workstation, and manual therapy techniques to reduce tension and improve pelvic alignment.
• Behavioral strategies: Making lifestyle changes like fluid intake, dietary adjustments, and bladder training techniques can help you manage OAB triggers. It also enables you to experience significant improvement in bladder control and symptom management.
2. Mindfulness-based therapies:
People with OAB mostly develop depression and anxiety due to the difficulty and challenges they face with OAB symptoms. If you manage your emotions with mindfulness-based therapies, you not only improve emotional health but also manage episodes of urinary urgency and incontinence. Here are some of the mindfulness-based therapies options:
• Breathing exercises: This includes controlled slow-paced breathing which is a part of bladder retraining. So that you can hold urine for longer periods.
• Mindfulness meditation and yoga: In smaller studies, it was found that mindful meditation and yoga can reduce urgent incontinence episodes.
• Biofeedback: It may be useful in bladder retraining by helping you identify and change your response to urinary urgency. This also improves sleeping difficulty which leads to nighttime urination.
In addition to mind-body therapies, traditional therapies like cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) can be used to treat depression in people in OAB, especially those whose symptoms don’t improve with other treatments.
3. Weight loss:
Obesity is linked with an increased risk of OAB and increases the severity of its symptoms. A 2012 study found that a BMI of 30 or greater can increase the risk of bladder leakage in women with OAB than in other weight categories. In comparison, a BMI of less than 30 doesn’t appear to increase such risk. This happens because obesity puts direct pressure on the bladder and also reduces blood flow in the pelvic floor. This indirectly triggers bladder contractions due to the release of cytokines and other inflammatory compounds. So, if you have OAB, you should maintain a healthy weight. To manage your weight, you can implement these techniques in your routine, including:
• Healthy balanced eating: You should make changes in your diet like reducing saturated fat and sugar intake while focusing on eating fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and fat-free or low-fat dairy, along with a wide variety of protein-rich foods like seafood, lean meats, poultry, eggs, legumes, soy, nuts, and seeds.
• Regular exercise: Regular workouts and gradually increasing the intensity from moderate to vigorous level activities can help you lose weight and even regulate your mood. You can also add core-stabilizing exercises to strengthen the pelvic muscles and improve bladder control.
There are no specific weight-loss plans for people with OAB, but you can talk with your healthcare provider to consult which plan works best for you.
4. Diet changes:
When you are living with OAB, you may need to avoid certain foods and drinks that may irritate your bladder and trigger sudden spasms in the bladder wall. To prevent this, you need to make some changes in your diet. Use a food journal to understand what foods trigger or make OAB symptoms worse. Here are some common foods and drinks that trigger OAB symptoms:
• Coffee, tea, and other caffeinated beverages
• Alcohol, including beer and wine
• Citrus fruits and drinks
• Sports drinks
• Tomato-based drinks, soups, and condiments
• Carbonated drinks
• Artificial sweeteners
• Spicy foods
• Chocolate
• Raw onions (cooked onions are good)
Certain preservatives like monosodium glutamate (MSG), may increase bladder sensitivity. You can eat food rich in vitamins C and D because it reduces urinary frequency and urgency.
5. Talk openly about OAB with your partner:
OAB symptoms can affect your sexual relationships with your partner, to avoid that, have an honest conversation with them about OAB. Doing this allows you to adjust your sex life together rather than trying to manage on your own. For example, if any position presses your bladder or makes you feel like peeing, you can try or find a new position. You can also keep towels close at hand or purchase fitted waterproof “play sheets” to ensure that your bed is dry in case of leakage.
Living with an overactive bladder can severely affect the quality of life. However, you add the above-mentioned strategies to manage OAB symptoms in your daily life and improve your life quality.
If you need help with an overactive bladder, visit our urology clinic in Brooklyn to get professional medical help. Call us to book your appointment now and ease your symptoms!!!!!
At Doral Health and Wellness Urology Center, our team of urologists will work with you in managing your disease and your quality of life. We also offer services, such as renal and bladder ultrasound. To schedule an appointment, please visit us at 1797 Pitkin Avenue, Brooklyn, New York 11212 or call 1-347-384-5690. You can also visit our website at https://www.urologistbrooklyn.com/.