Women face many challenges when dealing with urinary incontinence. As their incontinence progresses it’s on their minds more and more. Is there a bathroom at that playground? When I’m out with friends, will they notice that I’m going to the bathroom so often? Some women stay at home more often instead of risking being noticed.

Some career choices become challenging.

Sales representatives who walk during the day need to know where bathrooms are. Jobs with frequent customer meetings or phone calls require constant attention. Will I be able to keep up if I’m going to the bathroom all the time? I’ve got a big meeting tomorrow. Will I leak? Will my colleagues notice if I leave my desk all the time? These questions are always in the back of her mind.

One choice that women make is to drink less water. Less water, less chance to leak. While that does reduce the chance of a leak, women who don’t drink enough water risk dehydration.

The most common choice women make when incontinence starts is adjusting their lifestyles. For many women incontinence is embarrassing and something they don’t want to talk about. As a result, many women don’t seek treatment.

Behavioral options include Kegel Exercises, Bladder training, Habit training, Prompted voiding, and Vaginal cone exercises. These are appropriate for stress incontinence. Each of these exercises can improve your pelvic floor muscle strength.

You can do them at home, work, or when you’re out. Like any exercise, it’s up to you to do them properly, do them enough each day and each week. It’s also up to you to keep track of your progress. These are true do-it-yourself exercises.

FemiScan®, a biofeedback device, helps make Kegel exercises more effective. FemiScan® gives you feedback after each treatment over a 6 to 8 week period of 2 treatments each week. The feedback tells you what you did well and what you need to improve at the next treatment. It’s like your own personal trainer.

There are many prescription medications to help alleviate female urinary incontinence. Some include oxybutynin, tolterodine, darifenacin, and others. Medications can offer relief. Like many other medications, each one comes with its own side effects. If you have questions about medications, you should talk to your doctor.

For women who don’t respond to behavioral options or medication, surgery is an option. Also known as Vaginal Sling procedures, it might improve your stress incontinence but not your overactive bladder. If you have questions about surgery you should talk to your doctor.

It’s that leak when you sneeze, cough, laugh, jump, run, bend over, or do anything that stresses or puts too much pressure on your bladder. It can be a little drip or enough to dampen your clothes. The clinical definition is at least one leak within the past year.

The most common causes are child birth and aging. With child birth, your pelvic floor muscles are holding more and more weight over your pregnancy. That often stretches your muscles out. As a result they aren’t as able to hold your bladder in place, which pushes on your vagina and makes it more difficult to control leakage. With aging, your pelvic floor muscles tend to weaken.

Weight gain can also cause it, but it’s not entirely clear. It’s thought that increased weight can put more pressure on the abdomen. As that overpowers the strength of the pelvic floor muscles over time, they begin to weaken so that leakage can start.

It’s the urgent need to go suddenly, followed by leaking. You may get a minute’s warning or only a few seconds.

It’s thought to be caused by uncontrollable contractions in the bladder muscles. Urge incontinence can be caused by various neurological conditions. It can also be caused by an irritation of the bladder from an infection.

It's a combination of stress and urge incontinence – you have some stress incontinence and some urge incontinence. For each woman that symptoms are different.

A combination of weakened pelvic floor muscles and uncontrollable contractions in your bladder muscles.