Why does moving around help hold your pee in?
In: Biology
It’s the same reason we learn to shake our hand around when we stub a finger.
The “pee dance” is a way of distracting yourself.
Think of your spine like a highway. All the signals going to your brain are cars driving in that highway. Signals come from your bladderC go up your spine and fight for your attention. Sending signals down your spine to your leg muscles and getting signals back overloads that highway with “traffic”. This reduces the speed at which “I need to pee” signals can make it through to you.
We don’t really know whether this congestion happens in the spine or in the brain elsewhere, but we know we can only handle so much sensory input at a time.
Funny story. My middle school soccer coach was a balls to the wall Italian who took everything about the sport seriously. In soccer practice, if we needed to pee, he would say, “oh, you need to pee? Then run 5 laps. You sweat it out”. The science seemed so airtight at the time…
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