During my early years as a psychologist, I did a lot of research and study into
bedwetting and I know exactly what causes bedwettin. In another video here
on the channel I talked about how to stop bedwetting. It's really important to
understand what causes bedwetting. So that you can take the proper steps to
address it. And there are two causes. Now, to put the context around this. I did my
doctoral dissertation on bedwetting. I know a few things about this. My research
was published in the Journal of children's healthcare. Because of what we
found out and it has to do with one of the causes of bedwetting. Now, there are
two. Let me be clear about this. It doesn't happen without both causes being
in place. Because if one or the other is taken care of or resolved or cured
then the problem goes away. Before we get into the causes, I want to
acknowledge that there are different kinds of bedwetting. What we're talking
about here today is referred to as primary, nocturnal enuresis. Primary
versus secondary. Primary means that it's always been a problem. There has never
been a significant period (I think defined as six months or more) where
the child or the person was dry. Nocturnal means at night. So, they're not
wetting during the day. Only at night. That's why we call it bedwetting, right?
Primary nocturnal enuresis. And enuresis just means not being able to properly
control elimination from the bladder. Now, secondary is where there has been a
period of dryness that meets the criterion and then they return to the
wedding behavior later on. That's secondary. And then diurnal means
that it happens both during the day and at night. So, what we're talking about
here is primary nocturnal enuresis, okay? Bedwetting and it's never been cured for
any significant period of time. Two causes. Cause number one has to do with
your body chemistry. The body naturally creates chemicals and hormones that
regulate certain bodily functions. One of those hormones is called
A D H. Which stands for antidiuretic hormone.
Now, this hormone serves the purpose of drying us up at night. Oh, cool.
Most people don't have to get up at night and go to the bathroom. They just
sleep through the night and then go in and take care of business in the morning.
Why? Because there's a hormone that shuts down your in production. It actually
causes it to be more concentrated. And you don't have to get up and go. Well,
that's handy. Thank you for that. Nice. Some people whose hormones are out of
whack. Like pregnant women, for example. Or as we age and get older sometimes those
hormones don't keep up with the needs of the body. Or there's so many different
hormones, like in the case of pregnancy. That it interferes with each other. Well,
they need to get up and go during the night. But most people don't have to
because they've got plenty of this hormone. One of the causes of bedwetting
is a deficiency of antidiuretic hormone, ADH. So, with that in place, now, what about
this second cause? This is the one that I demonstrated with my dissertation
research. Deep sleeping. Every parent that I had talked to as I was in an earlier
phase of my career as I was working with little kids who wet the bed. Every parent
that I talked to said, "Oh yeah, they're really hard to wake up."
Like harder than my other kids to wake up. It's true. My dissertation research
proved it. And it had never been shown in the clinical literature (Prior to that
point) that these kids sleep more deeply or more accurately. They are harder to
wake up than normal age-matched peers. I demonstrated this
with my research. It was kind of fun because I developed an apparatus. It was
like a glorified alarm clock. We put this in kids rooms and it would come on with
a white noise alarm. Sounded kind of like this. (*Cheet, cheet cheet *) I know.
Kind of a weird sound. But we measured that and calibrated it to certain noise
levels at the child's pillow. And if they would hear that, they had to do certain
tasks and respond to that in order to measure how responsive they were to this
stimulus that happened during the night. See, what we're trying to do is determine,
okay, probably their nervous system is working and they're getting signals from
the full-bladder downstairs that it's time to get up and go but it's not
waking up their sleeping brain. So we can used a different kind of a stimulus to
test it. Here's what we found: Kids who wet the bed... And I was testing
kids from about age six up through about age 12. Had a bunch of them and then we
matched him up by age and other demographic variables so that we could
get a good sense of this. What we found is kids who wet the bed are harder to
wake up. They're less... We call the task responsive. They're less responsive
during the night or while they're sleeping to the stimulus that I just
described you. Interesting. And by extrapolation, we can say, "Okay, they're
probably less responsive to the signals coming up from their own bladder too. And
they're just not responding." So, check it out. If we have a deficiency of the
hormone, we're going to need to get up and go during the night. If we're
sleeping to do deeply, we're going to sleep right through the
signals that we need to get up and go. And we're going to have a bedwetting
incident. Well, what if we're not sleeping that deeply? If we're not sleeping that
deeply, then when the signals come up from the bladder, we're going to respond to
that and go to the bathroom. So, if we're not sleeping too deeply or if we have
enough of the hormone, we don't have to get up in the first place. And so it
doesn't matter that we're sleeping so deeply. You have to have both. Both
problems or causes in order to have the bedwetting problem. Now this is important
to know. Some of the traditional treatments for bedwetting are simply
symptom treatments. There's a nasal spray for example. It's actually a version of a
synthetic hormone to mimic the action of the ADH.
It's called DDAVP. And it was used for years. I think they're still using it to
administer... At night time before the child goes to bed and it dries them up
for the night. Because it takes care of the hormone problem. See? Then, we don't
have the bedwetting incident even though they're still sleeping deeply. My
treatment program that I developed as part of my dissertation research
addresses the other cause. It has to do with the deep sleeping and can we train
that little brain to respond when those signals are coming up from the full
bladder. We'll get into this in more detail in another video. And also there's
an e-book that I put together that summarizes my treatment program at
finallydry.info. We'll link to that down in the description. So, that you can
get connected to that e-book in. It gives some of the approaches that we're
using. Remember, if we can solve either one, we've solved the problem. And
statistically speaking, most people grow out of the hormone problem by the time
they're teenagers. Now, some people persist into the late teens and even
adulthood. Those are a little more challenging to address. But you know what?
What if we can address this sleep problem? Then it doesn't matter
where we are with the hormone. You see where I'm coming from on that? That's why
it's so important to understand the causes of it. Then we can get busy
looking at what can we do about it now. We've got another video here about how to cure
bedwetting. You can get a preview at finallydry.info.
I saw standing in the