Do you ever find yourself waking up at night to urinate? Isn't that the most annoying thing
ever!? Not only does it disrupt your sleep, but it makes you feel horrible the next day
so what can you do about it? Well today, I'm Dr. Rena Malik, urologist and pelvic surgeon,
and I'm going to share eight tips to help you wake up less often at night to urinate
and if you like my content, please make sure to give me a thumbs up on this video subscribe and
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if you missed it last week I talked about some causes of nocturia or waking up at night to
urinate so make sure you check it out so you know exactly why are you actually waking up at night
so now let's get into it what are eight ways that you can easily help reduce your number of
times you wake up at night the first and foremost is watch what you drink two hours before bedtime
so stop drinking fluids at about two hours before bedtime and if you need to take medications before
bed just take it with one little sip of water if you're drinking a lot before bed naturally
your bladder will get full with a lot of fluid and require you to wake up sooner even i notice that i
wake up at night if i drink too late and so i have to stop myself from drinking a couple hours before
bedtime also certain things like bladder irritants in the evening can make that over activity or the
bladder spasms that make you feel the urge to wake up at night more common and so what are
bladder irritants well i have a whole video on them and exactly why they cause these irritations
but the most common ones that i see are caffeine and alcohol there's also a number of other ones
but they don't affect everybody equally so make sure you check out that video to learn the other
bladder irritants and how to manage those number three is going to the bathroom twice so what does
that exactly mean we call it double voiding in urology and what exactly it is is you sit down on
the toilet you go to the bathroom empty and then stand up walk around again and sit back down and
go again that will help if you are having a little bit of incomplete emptying meaning you're not
emptying your bladder completely that will help you empty completely and hopefully allow you to
sleep a little longer before you get full number four if you're taking a diuretic or a water pill
then you want to talk to your primary care doctor about the timing of that water pill you definitely
don't want to take it at night before you go to sleep because then you'll be up all night and
if you take it in the morning you will actually reaccumulate some fluid at night in your legs or
in the lower part of your body that will then create that higher urine volume so you ideally
want to take it midday but of course talk to your primary care doctor and make sure that that's okay
before you do anything like that number five if you have diabetes you really want to control your
sugars especially in the evening all those extra sugars can get into your bladder and then can
cause a lot of bladder irritation and cause you to wake up more often at time number six limit your
salt intake especially if you have something like congestive heart failure or swelling in your legs
because that can worsen that swelling which again creates that increased urine volume number seven
try to wear compression stockings or elevate your legs in the evening before you go to sleep that
will help if there's any swelling or accumulation of a fluid in those legs with you getting up less
often at nighttime and lastly kegel exercises i've talked about kegel exercises a lot before
or pelvic floor physical therapy you can check out my video on it but particularly for waking up at
night you can do what we call urge suppression techniques and what that is is when you get the
urge to urinate you do three to five really quick kegel exercises and wait for that urge or that
strong desire to urinate to go away because it always will it gets really really strong and then
it goes away and then once it goes away you can go calmly to the bathroom and that sort of helps to
connect your brain to your bladder again and helps it know hey you can hold more and you can wait
for this urge to come on a little bit later in fact they've done studies on this and at
about three months of after doing this pretty consistently they've seen that people have on
average reduce the number of times they wake up from point 0.4 to 1.2 times at night what exactly
is point four well it's hard to say but really you might be able to wake up one less time at night
and most importantly this will improve your sleep quality and your sleep related quality
of life which is so important i know all of you have been there when you haven't slept well the
night before your next day can be totally awful all right well i hope you enjoyed this video thank
you so much for watching and as always remember to take care of yourself because you're worth it