A quick trip to the bathroom is a small inconvenience when you have to get out of bed in the middle of the night. But if you’re taking bathroom breaks regularly throughout the day, and still find yourself having to urinate multiple times at night, you may be concerned about how frequently you’re going.
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In truth, the frequency of urination is different for everyone. There’s no one answer for how often you should pee in a day. But if your number of trips to the bathroom is becoming bothersome and your ability to urinate is interrupting your daily life — or worse, you experience some pain when you pee — you may want to see a healthcare provider.
Urinary issues can come up for anyone of any gender, but if you’re a cisgender man or a person assigned male at birth (AMAB) there are specific underlying causes that might be contributing to your frequent flow. Urologist Petar Bajic, MD, walks us through some of the more common causes.
What does ‘frequent urination’ mean?
Frequent urination looks different for everyone, and it isn’t always a sign of trouble brewing. As Dr. Bajic explains, whether or not you’re urinating too much comes down to whether or not you’re bothered by it.
“Most of the people that are complaining about frequent urination might be bothered by urinating every hour, two hours, or sometimes even three hours,” he says. “You’re either bothered by it because it’s annoying or because it’s interfering with your ability to do certain things or activities.”
What causes frequent urination in men?
There are a lot of conditions behind frequent urination — and sometimes, it just boils down to how you drink and process fluids. In general, there are two categories of urinary symptoms of frequent urination.
“If your bladder fills too quickly or if your bladder doesn’t hold a lot, you’re going to have urinary frequency and you might have urinary urgency. We call those storage symptoms,” says Dr. Bajic. “Then, there’s a separate set of symptoms of what we call voiding symptoms. These are ones that are more related to having difficulty trying to empty the bladder like having a weak urinary stream or a sensation of incomplete emptying.”
Here are some common causes of frequent urination that show symptoms of each:
Your bladder is full
When you eat food and drink fluids, the things you consume are broken down into nutrients that then fuel different biological processes in your body and keep you alive. Your kidneys remove unneeded nutrients (known as waste) from your blood and create urine that’s then stored in your bladder. Your bladder is a hollow organ about the size of a grapefruit in your pelvic area. As it fills with urine, it expands. When you go to the bathroom, the walls of your bladder contract so you can pee, and when you’re done, your bladder shrinks back down.
If you’re having …….