Bladder leaks are one of the most common problems women quietly live with, and one of the least talked about. If you leak urine when you laugh, cough, sneeze, or exercise, or a sudden, hard-to-put-off urge sends you racing for the bathroom, this episode of The Habit Healers Podcast is for you.
I’m Dr. Laurie Marbas, and today I’m walking you through the two main patterns behind urinary incontinence in women: stress incontinence, where pressure from a cough or a laugh triggers the leak, and urge incontinence, the pattern behind what many people know as overactive bladder. They can look identical by the time you’re changing your clothes, but they start in very different places, and that difference shapes which treatment your doctor should consider first. We’ll talk about why “just do Kegels” is incomplete advice, what pelvic floor exercises actually did in randomized trials, how bladder training really works, and what mixed incontinence means when both patterns show up in the same week. Then I’ll give you the Leak Pattern Decoder, a simple three-day bladder diary that captures what happened in the seconds before each leak, so you can bring your doctor a pattern instead of a guess.
What you’ll learn:
The difference between stress incontinence and urge incontinence, and why it matters
What pelvic floor exercises and Kegels can and cannot fix
How bladder training for overactive bladder actually works
How to keep a three-day bladder diary your doctor can use
The warning signs that mean you should see your doctor first
Dr. Marbas Substack Article: https://drlauriemarbas.substack.com/p/what-happened-right-before-your-bladder
Check out the Habit Healers Community: https://www.skool.com/habithealers/about
