Why does pee becomes harder to stop once you started peeing?
In: Biology
You and everyone else that is a human, have two different nervous systems that work together in the body.
One is under your conscious control… For things like moving your arms, chewing your food, and deciding to make a silent-but-deadly fart on the elevator.
The other controls things automatically, such as your beating heart, the digestion of your food, and dialation of your eyes.
Where your bladder and rectum are concerned, there are two groups of muscles, called sphincters, that act as a valve, to either release, or restrict the flow of your pee and poop – one is on manual control, the other is on automatic.
When you decide to go to the bathroom, you make a concious effort to open one of the pair of sphincters – the one under your concious control.
The other sphincter is under automatic control, and usually it will play along too, but sometimes it does not.
This is why some people are “pee shy” when peeing in public. The automatic nervous system wont relax control of the sphincter under it’s control.
Sometimes, it’s the other way around… It has released, and is not going to clamp back down again until you are empty.
This is also why you sometimes get “pee shivers” when you are nearly done.
The automatic nervous system is releasing control of your bladder back to the manual nervous system again and for a split second, it’s like a light switch toggling back and forth between the two systems, so you “shiver”, before the manual control is resumed.
Sorry for the long text wall… I hope this answers your question.
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TL;DR: You have two sphincters, one on manual, one on automatic…and your brains (automatic and manual) fight for control over your bladder, while peeing.
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I don’t think the real ELI5 is here yet.
Your pee works on a pressure system. Your sphincter is a valve holding that urine back. But once the valve opens, the pressure differential between your bladder and the outside world opens… the flow must go on. You can close that valve, but you are fighting against the flow of urine. It’s certainly doable, just harder and not what it was designed to do (as there would normally be no biological need to manually stop peeing). Like others have said, you can strengthen and “train” that muscle. Source: I’m in the water industry 😀
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