Whether it's in the middle of a movie, during an important meeting with your boss or at the moment you leave your doorstep, when you gotta go, you gotta go. And sometimes you just have to fight back. Yet in the battle of your willpower vs. your bladder, is there really a winner?
"The bladder is very adaptable," says Alex Shteynshlyuger, a urologist at New York Urology Specialists. "It's designed to hold a lot, so holding for a little bit isn't going to cause any problems."
First, some science: Organs are born doing what they do, whereas many muscles need some training. The bladder is a hybrid of the two. We aren't born knowing how to control our bladder (see: diapers), but with teaching and practice, we get the hang of it, says James Ulchaker, a urologist at The Cleveland Clinic.
The bladder is made of muscular and elastic tissue, and the fuller the bladder, the more the elastic tissue stretches. When it's finally time to let loose, the brain signals the inhibitory nerves that it's fine to squeeze, emptying your bladder (and triggering an "aah," if there was an especially long line).
If holding it is an infrequent, once-every-good-movie type of thing, there's no real risk, Shteynshlyuger says. The danger lies in forming a habit: When you're keeping it in a few hours past when you feel you need to go, for years at a time - the "extreme sports" version of bladder holding, as he calls it.