Anxiety, especially chronic anxiety, causes more than nervousness alone. The fight or flight system can overwhelm the brain and body, leading to excessive urination, frequent urination, and many other urinary challenges.
Frequent urination, such as frequently feeling like you have to go to the washroom, or feeling like you have to go to the bathroom soon after you already did, is a common anxiety disorder symptom. It occurs because of how chronic anxiety affects the body.
Urinary symptoms such as frequency, urgency, burning or retention are most common in women and become an automatic response to anxiety-provoking or sexual stimuli.
Urinating Often
It's highly likely that this relates back to the activation of the fight or flight system. The constant need to urinate occurs most often in those with general anxiety disorder and panic attacks - two groups that tend to have levels of high anxiety, but not pure terror.
Other studies showed a relationship between anxiety and overactive bladder and urinary incontinence symptoms. One report showed that 48% or almost a half of the OAB subjects had anxiety symptoms, and one quarter or 24% of OAB subjects had moderate to severe anxiety.
Conclusions. 27.5 % of OAB patients have depression. OAB patients with depression reported more severe urinary incontinence symptoms, greater bother and more impact on quality of life compared to those without depression.
Previous studies have suggested that lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS), e.g., urinary frequency, pressure, urgency, overactive bladder and interstitial cystitis, frequently co-occur with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorders (ADHD) and anxiety disorders.
About paruresis
A person with paruresis (shy bladder syndrome) finds it difficult or impossible to urinate (pee) when other people are around. Paruresis is believed to be a common type of social phobia, ranking second only to the fear of public speaking. Paruresis is often first experienced at school.
If you find yourself feeling as though you need to urinate all the time, the best thing you can do is simply learn to relax. Getting up and walking around can be a big help. Often sitting actually creates more urine anyway, so you'll find yourself needing to pee all the time especially when you stand up.
There is usually an accompanying obsession that is disturbing, but the patient may be unaware of it. For example, I have treated patients whose primary OCD symptom is experiencing the frequent urge to urinate.
Stress and General Bladder Discomfort
Even if you haven't been formally diagnosed with any of these bladder conditions, stress can cause general feelings of discomfort, urgency (the sudden need to urinate), and frequency (the need to urinate more often than normal).
Symptoms of Stress Incontinence
If you have stress incontinence, you may notice that you accidentally leak urine when you move or perform certain activities. The urine leakage may be an occasional drop or dribble if the condition is mild. In severe cases, you may leak a stream of urine.
Shy bladder syndrome (paruresis) is a type of social anxiety disorder. People who have this disorder are unable to or have severe difficulty urinating (peeing) when they're away from home. No matter how urgently they have to go, they have a lot of trouble peeing in a bathroom that isn't their own.
Urge incontinence.
You have a sudden, intense urge to urinate followed by an involuntary loss of urine. You may need to urinate often, including throughout the night. Urge incontinence may be caused by a minor condition, such as infection, or a more severe condition such as a neurological disorder or diabetes.
Every woman goes on her own schedule, but generally, peeing 6-8 times in 24 hours is considered normal for someone who is healthy, and isn't pregnant. If you're going more often than that, you may be experiencing frequent urination. Frequent urination can happen on its own and isn't always a sign of a health problem.
Check in with your health care provider if: There's no obvious reason for your frequent urination, such as drinking more total fluids, alcohol or caffeine. The problem disrupts your sleep or everyday activities. You have other urinary problems or symptoms that worry you.
The Impact of Stress on the Bladder
And it's thought that the adrenaline pumping through you triggers your need to pee. So, there's definitely a link between what's going on in your brain (fear, anxiety, etc) and what might be coming out of your bladder. Anxiety and stress can cause you to urinate more frequently, too.
We've established that it's not uncommon for anxiety and overactive bladder to occur together (with anxiety at least contributing to OAB).
Needing to urinate right after you've just gone is not only annoying but can be a sign of an underlying health problem. While this is commonly related to drinking a lot of water or taking medication, sometimes, it could mean something more serious like an infection or diabetes.
There are two types of anxiety urination. There is instant urination that genuinely occurs during moments of complete terror, and there is frequent urination, which is the sensation of needing to urinate often without necessarily drinking excess water/liquid.
Normal voiding is essentially a spinal reflex modulated by the central nervous system (brain and spinal cord), which coordinates function of the bladder and urethra. The bladder and urethra are innervated by 3 sets of peripheral nerves arising from the autonomic nervous system (ANS) and somatic nervous system.
Normally, people can hold urine in their bladders until they reach the bathroom. Incontinence – sometimes called "urinary incontinence" – is the inability to hold urine in the bladder. The bladder, located in the pelvis, is a balloon-shaped organ that stores urine made by the kidneys.
Increased Bladder Stress.
Being in a constant state of go, go, go along with being active can put a lot of stress on the bladder, leading to accidents and increased incontinence symptoms. Additionally, ADHD medications are often stimulants that may add even more stress on the bladder.