Lifestyle tips to help manage incontinence symptoms without medication

Urinary incontinence can be frustrating, interfering with your daily activities and disrupting your nighttime sleep. While it isn’t always preventable, a few everyday changes can make a real difference. Try these lifestyle changes to help you achieve better bladder and bowel control.

Maintain a healthy weight. Excess abdominal fat can strain pelvic floor muscles, place pressure on the bladder, and interfere with the bladder’s blood and nerve supply. Fat tissue itself may contribute to overactive bladder by altering the balance of chemical messengers between nerve cells. If you’re overweight or obese, losing some weight can help a lot. On average, losing 10% of body weight produces a 50% improvement in both stress and urgency urinary incontinence in women who are overweight or obese.

Don’t smoke. Smoking nearly doubles the likelihood that a woman will develop stress incontinence, perhaps because it can lead to frequent and vigorous coughing. It also raises the risk for urgency incontinence in women. Nicotine itself has been independently linked to urgency incontinence, no matter the delivery method (smoking, vaping, etc.). Current or former smoking is also associated with several urinary symptoms in men, including urgency incontinence.

Stay active. Don’t let fear of leaks keep you from moving. In the long-running Nurses’ Health Study, middle-aged women who were most physically active were least likely to develop incontinence. However, high-impact exercises (such as jumping jacks) or specific maneuvers (such as a golf swing) can elicit leakage if you have stress incontinence, so you may need to wear pads or special underwear.

Cut back on caffeine and other bladder irritants. Caffeine is a diuretic that results in rapid filling of the bladder and a powerful urge to urinate, even when the bladder is not full. Drinking just two cups of coffee per day has been linked to a higher risk of urinary incontinence. Like caffeine, alcohol is a diuretic that can create the urge to urinate.

Minimize bladder irritants. Several foods have been linked to urgency incontinence. Carbonated drinks, the artificial sweetener aspartame (such as NutraSweet or Equal), spicy foods, coffee, black and green tea, and citrus fruits and juices cause urgency in some people.

By making a few simple but meaningful changes to your daily routine, you can gain better control over urinary incontinence and improve your quality of life. While it may take time to find the strategies that work best for you, even small adjustments can lead to noticeable improvements. Remember, you don’t have to accept incontinence as an inevitable part of life. With the right lifestyle habits and guidance from your doctor, you can take proactive steps toward better bladder health and greater confidence every day.

For more on treating bladder and bowel incontinence, read Better Bladder and Bowel Control, a Special Health Report from Harvard Medical School.

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