When you’re not under stress, you can wait to relieve yourself until your bladder is completely full. You may become more focused on your need to urinate when you are anxious.
Ashwini Nandkarni is an associate psychiatrist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. HuffPost, “[People will] Use a selective filter and pay attention to the sensation that you’re about to poop, but objectively it’s possible they don’t actually urinate or not as often as they believe.” Anxiety has a way of lying to you and sending you the false message that you have to pee when you really don’t have to.
To support her argument,Study of 2014 Mousepublished in the American Journal of Physiology-Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology measured bladder sensitivity in relation to chronic stress. The study found that stressed mice had lower tolerances for unpleasant sensations. One of these was the urge to urinate. “They [the mice] also felt those sensations more intensely …,” explained Malik via YouTube. It is a condition called hyperalgesia, which she explained. “It may be why we feel uncomfortable when experiencing chronic stress and find that even normal things like going to the bathroom are a bother. We want to get to the bathroom faster to rid ourselves of this uncomfortable feeling.”