How your bladder is controlled - Female

Brain-Bladder Connection: Controlling Urination

This video explores the fascinating connection between your brain and bladder. It explains how they work together to control urination, including how the bladder sends signals to the brain when it's full and how the brain coordinates bladder emptying.

View the video above - or read the transcript below.

Transcript

In this short film, you will learn about how the brain and bladder connect and work together to control bladder, empty the bladder stores urine until you are ready to empty it, to urinate the bladder, send signals along the spinal cord to your brain that it's filling up. This signals the feeling that you need to urinate when everything is working normally. You can then decide when to empty your bladder. The bladder receives signals as it fills with urine to indicate the need to urinate.

When the bladder is about halfway full, around 250 milliliters, you get the first sensation you need to urinate. As the bladder continues to fill, the sensation becomes stronger and the urgency to urinate increases. The bladder muscles relax as your bladder fills, but contract when you urinate. The sphincter muscle controls flow of urine out of the bladder, which squeezes the urethra shut as the bladder fills and relaxes as the bladder is empty.

How often you need to urinate depends on several things, such as your fluid intake, how much urine you produce, how much you're in your bladder, comfortably hold. So that's a short explanation of the connection between your brain and bladder and how they work together when it comes to emptying your bladder.

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