STOP Waking Up to Pee: 3 Fixes That Actually Work

If you’re dealing with frequent urination at night, it’s probably not linked to prostate or bladder health. Find out how to prevent nighttime urination by addressing the real root cause so you can finally sleep through the night.

If you are waking up to pee at night, your problem is usually not in your bladder or your prostate. It’s actually in your legs and I’m going [music] to prove it. So, I’m going to challenge you tonight in your bathroom. I want you to have a large cup in the bathroom, [music] right next to the toilet. And when you wake up in the middle of night, I don’t want you to flush the urine through the toilet.

I want you to collect [music] the urine in a cup and measure how much urine comes out of your body. Most people are not just passing a few drops of urine. They’re passing at least one or two cups of urine. That is a normal full bladder of urine, which means the bladder is not failing you. It’s not the problem.

It fills up to its capacity. It tells you when it’s full, but the real question is why are you producing a full bladder of urine in the middle of the night? And the answer has nothing to do with your bladder or your prostate. It has everything to do with something lower than that, which is your legs. In fact, the origin of the urine that came out at 2:00 in the morning is not the liquid that you drank right before bed.

It was the liquid that you drank in the earlier part of the day, probably around 4:00. By the time that we reach 80 years old, nearly nine out of 10 people are waking up to urinate at night. And unfortunately, there’s a big risk getting up in the middle of night in the dark, tripping, falling, fracturing. So, it’s not without problems. The second test I want you to do, and you can do this right now, is an edema test.

Okay, this is a test to see if you’re holding fluid. Right by the front part of your shin, press firmly into your lower leg. Hold it for about 5 seconds. If it leaves a dent, there’s fluid sitting inside your tissue right now. And here’s the shocking part, an average person who’s normal, who doesn’t have edema, is holding 6 lb of fluid in the legs.

I’m not talking about your entire leg, I’m talking about below the knee, the lower legs. Both of them hold normally about 6 lb of fluid. And just as a side note, fluid retention does not occur because the person is drinking too much fluid. Fluid retention also isn’t necessarily caused by consuming excess salt if everything is healthy. So, the big question is, what is holding all this fluid in your legs?

High glucose and higher amounts of insulin. Insulin has a purpose of storing fat, but it has another huge purpose. In fact, insulin is the most powerful sodium retaining hormone in the entire body. And unfortunately, doctors don’t do a fasting insulin test. If you get your fasting insulin test, you want it below five.

Higher glucose, higher insulin causes the kidneys to hoard salt. So, in other words, you can look at glucose like another type of salt because glucose retains water. I mean, even take a look at a diabetic. What’s happening with them? They usually have massive retention in the lower legs.

They usually are peeing a lot and they’re thirsty a lot. So, yes, they’re getting rid of fluid, but they’re retaining a tremendous amount of fluid. There’s actually a diagnosis for that called insulin edema. And you’ll see it around the eyes, too. You get puffiness around the eyes.

You might see fluid around the face, the arms, definitely the lower legs. Now, what’s really happening in the capillaries and the blood vessels in the lower legs is you normally have this very thin layer. It’s called the endothelial glycocalyx. Think about it like a very thin microscopic layer of this sugar gel coating. Its job is to act as a tight barrier to keep the fluid sealed inside that blood vessel.

Well, guess what? When you just have hours of high blood glucose, that protective layer gets shredded and stripped away. And without any barrier, protein starts leaking through the little tiny crevices and the holes into the tissues. And wherever the protein goes, you get actually fluid retention. And also, on the flip side, notice when someone goes on a low-carb ketogenic diet.

What’s the first thing that happens? They drop a tremendous amount of fluid. Sometimes 5 to 11 lb in the first few days. The kidneys were finally able to dump the trapped salt and the fluid that’s been sitting in your legs. And this is also why, if you consume a very heavy carbohydrate meal and maybe snack in the evening, you are directly stripping out this lining and you’ll probably end up in the morning with fluid retention.

But not only that, you probably are getting up through the night to pee. So, the question is, why are people having like more urination problems at night? Maybe even more than during the day. Well, that’s because of gravity. So, here’s really what happens.

You’re lying on your back. Gravity is no longer pushing the fluid down into your legs. Slowly, the fluid from your legs is coming back to the heart. And it’s being filtered by the kidneys and it’s ending up in your bladder as a full bladder of urine. Once a night, twice a night, three times a night, it could be four times.

I’ve talked to people who were getting up 10 times a night to urinate. Now, even when someone has sleep apnea, the restriction of breathing, okay, causes more pressure on the heart, which causes more activation on your kidneys to release more urine. Another huge cause of getting up through the night is side effects from a lot of different medications, high blood pressure medications, diabetic medications. A lot of those increase the production of urine and that’s a completely different situation. But you need to know about it so you can deal with that with your doctor.

But typically, stopping drinking after 6:00 p. m. is not the ultimate solution to fix your problem. Restricting your salt is not the ultimate solution. What is the solution is fixing the sugar.

Then you’ll fix the salt. Then the fluid dumps. So, ideally, a person who’s healthy should be able to drink in the evening, even have some salt, and not get up through the night. With myself, I don’t get up through the middle of night. I don’t have fluid retention like I used to.

And I drink a tremendous amount of water in the evening. So, this is actually not a hard problem to fix. Okay, the first thing you need to know is the snacks at night are the worst thing you could possibly do because you’re going to keep your insulin high right before you go to bed. In fact, the worst time to snack at all is right before bed, okay? It’s really bad.

You should have a sign that says the kitchen is closed after you have dinner, okay? And then no food after that. Number two, if you’re able to walk after dinner for 10 minutes, it’ll help burn off the glucose, and all that fluid accumulation in the lower legs can be pumped out, but you also burn off the sugar. So, a lot of people ask me, “What supplements do I recommend? ” Now, of course, I’m not biased with my own high-quality supplement line, but if you go to Amazon and type Dr.

Berg supplements, you’ll find more information. And then the other thing you can do is elevate your legs in the evening. Let’s say you’re watching TV, lie down on the couch, bring your legs up. The fluid will start coming down. You’ll be able to pee out that fluid before you go to bed.

As you fix your diet, fix the sugar, go on a low-carb diet, and if you’re not familiar with the ketogenic diet, I’m going to put a link down below of the simple version of exactly how to get started with intermittent fasting. I have a free download that I want to give to you. This free download is my daily routine in a checklist. This is a routine that I use every day to feel like I’m 18 years old even though I’m 60 years old and I want to give it to you for free. And so there’s a littl