Passing Gas while sleeping but not releasing a bowel movement

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How does the body pass gas’s when sleeping but contain motor control to the muscles regulating bowel movements at the same time? In other words, how can we continue sleeping and pass gas, but not shart the bed?
Secondly, what mechanism makes us wake up to go the the bathroom if it’s serious enough to actually have a bowel movement (like if we were suffering from diarrhea and sick?). Same applies to urinating? How does the body know to hold it in, but when serious enough, wake us up?

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16 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

There is actually a great TED talk on the subject. Basically there is a kind of valve and it acts like a gate that let’s out air but if a solid touches it remains closed.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It’s the rectoanal inhibitory reflex, aka. rectal vault sampling. It’s an unconscious mechanism, your unconscious brain knows the difference between gas and those three processed stuffed bell peppers you had for lunch.

[RAIR source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectoanal_inhibitory_reflex?wprov=sfla1)

Anonymous 0 Comments

i suspect you had an accident and wants to know why and how to prevent it from happening again

Anonymous 0 Comments

It actually has a lot to do with potty training and how well a person takes to it as a child. People tend to fart either right before they go to bed and as soon as they wake up or as soon as they go to sleep and throughout the night here and there, and again it goes back to potty training. I read about this in some study that they did about potty training and something with adulthood. I don’t exactly remember what otherwise I would simply link it, but the two are very interlinked according to the study that I read. Supposedly people who took to the potty training really well as a child are the ones who have to fart before they can go to sleep and do not fart during sleep, and are the ones who have to fart immediately when they wake up because basically, not to be crass, but there butt hole has been trained so well to stay shut while they’re asleep that they can’t even release a fart, which is some thing that we naturally should be able to do while sleeping since it’s essentially harmless. In theory, pooping and pissing are also sort of harmless if you really think about it, if we were caveman or whatever, living in the wild and didn’t have to wear clothing and white not And weren’t sleeping in beds and stuff then it wouldn’t really matter if we were pooping in pissing in the middle of the night as we slept. It’s literally that we’ve potty train ourselves or while our parents potty train us, to not do these things, but they don’t train us to not fart. It’s just that some children take the no pooping subconsciously so well that they’re calling won’t allow itself to open even to release air.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It’s learned behavior. Potty training becomes subconscious. Try as I might, I can’t think of any other common examples of this except yelling “Attention!” near someone sleeping and right out of boot camp. (Not that I know first hand, but lots of prank videos on YouTube these days.)

Anonymous 0 Comments

I had explosive diarrhoea whilst sleeping in a hotel in Bali, Indonesia. The smell woke up my girlfriend and then she woke me up. Turns out I had Bali belly from eating the local food/or drinking dirty water.

The explosive shits then lasted another 3 days or so, this meant I couldn’t travel too far from my hotel because I feared I would shit my pants.

Good memories.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Whenever I wake up in the morning it takes 30 minutes for my bowels to be “switched on” again. I always take a shit in the morning, 30 minutes after waking up like clockwork. I’m pretty sure that sleep stops your bowels movement, why else does it take me 30 minutes to get it?

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because our relaxed state is a closed butt, but air can slip out easily because it’s just bubbles that don’t require the muscles to force out in the same way as poop. We trained ourselves not to poop or pre at night, and at night there’s a hormone released that helps our bladder to stop giving the signal to eliminate. This stuff happens in the background while we’re awake and it happens in the background while we’re sleeping too. You don’t just chose when you need to pre or poop. You do it when your body tells you

Anonymous 0 Comments

ELI5: The tube that contains our poop is able to sense between farts (gas), diarrhea (liquid), and poops (solids). It help us fart but not poop our pants. Although sometimes you trust a fart and your poop sampler makes a mistake and you poop a little.

#nevertrustafart

The rectoanal inhibitory reflex (RAIR) (also known as the anal sampling mechanism, anal sampling reflex, rectosphincteric reflex, or anorectal sampling reflex) is a reflex characterized by a transient involuntary relaxation of the internal anal sphincter in response to distention of the rectum.[1] The RAIR provides the upper anal canal with the ability to discriminate between flatus and fecal material.

The ability of the rectum to discriminate between gaseous, liquid and solid contents is essential to the ability to voluntarily control defecation. The RAIR allows for voluntary flatulation to occur without also eliminating solid waste, irrespective of the presence of fecal material in the anal canal

Anonymous 0 Comments

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