Are you ever torn between wanting to “experience” incontinence versus being oblivious to it?

[Enthusi]

Hopefully others can relate…  

It’s like, on one hand you want to know you’re making progress towards goals. On the other hand, progress might mean not really paying attention to your bladder and how much you’ve wet.   

It reminds me of the classic thought experiment, “don’t think about pinK elephants.” 
 

 

[Kif]

I can relate!

I find myself drifting to paying too-much attention to my bladder a lot more when I'm not peeing frequently; it's easier to ignore it when I'm peeing a lot. 

I've been pushing fluids but this wasn't consistent except in the afternoons for me. Roughly a week ago it was because I realized I didn't get into the rhythm of sipping water every 5-10 minutes until lunch. 

So, I've been focusing on pushing fluids as soon as I wake and it has been getting better. It also has had the side effect of pushing my colon much more quickly into an "after every meal" rhythm again.

My hope is that if I can keep this up long-enough to see sphincter muscle atrophy that I can loosen up a bit on it and I either won't notice my bladder or it won't matter.

One interesting thing I have noticed with pushing fluids is that coffee "doesn't count"? Like, it's a diuretic, but when I drink coffee the fluid flow out slows down quite a bit unless I continue to also sip water. Have you ever noticed this too?

[Stroller]

Not really, for me.  Barely being aware I'm wetting, and experiencing lack of control are pretty much the same thing for me.  It happens, I notice, but often only at the back of my mind.  That's what works for me - it's probably similar to how I was when I was a real toddler.

[Little BabyDoll Christine]

No. Why would I want the extra work and hassle. The less I HAVE to do, the more time I have for what I WANT to do

[Little Sherri]

9 hours ago, Enthusi said:

It’s like, on one hand you want to know you’re making progress towards goals. On the other hand, progress might mean not really paying attention to your bladder and how much you’ve wet.   

It reminds me of the classic thought experiment, “don’t think about pinK elephants.” 

I was discussing this a while back with @oznl, with respect to trying to "achieve" not having to wake up at night to go. I had been a prolific and accomplished bedwetter as a kid, and since putting myself back in diapers at night about three+ years ago, it had seemed for a while that I was on a path back bedwetting, which was fine with me - I'd rather it take care of itself than have to wake up to go. That had started happening, on rare occasions, and usually only after a night on the turps, but, the incidence rate was ticking upward. But then, I moved a bit into the country, and maybe it's the country air, or maybe it's all the yardwork, but, I started sleeping like a rock. And waking up dry, or, waking up dry, and needing to pee. 

In discussing with Oz, who is further ahead of me on the 24/7 path, one thing he noted was that I was in the habit of going to bed in a dry diaper - the last thing I usually did before calling it a night was to take a shower, and put a new diaper on. He suggested that being in a dry diaper was perhaps inhibiting the required subconscious relaxation, and that maybe going to bed a bit wet might help. I decided to try that out, and, it does seem to have helped a bit - I'm still not wetting overnight with any great frequency, but, I'm back to having diaper dreams, and I suspect that I've wet here and there... but that's difficult to confirm when one is already wet going in. So, I devised a scheme to weigh my diaper before I went to bed, and to weigh it again in the morning, so as to carefully and empirically catalogue how much I was wetting. You know, in service to helping me relax about it. Much to your point @Enthusi, he noted the absurdity of obsessively documenting the exact degree of one's relaxation. One can't very well assemble a spreadsheet to carefully track when they haven't thought about pink elephants, can one? 

[Stroller]

1 hour ago, Little Sherri said:

One can't very well assemble a spreadsheet to carefully track when they haven't thought about pink elephants, can one? 

Is that a challenge?  I'll have to think about it.  Or not, of course...

[Dragonmiss2013]

Yeah pink elephants are bad, but you have to watch out for the blue rhinos.

[Enthusi]

4 hours ago, Dragonmiss2013 said:

Yeah pink elephants are bad, but you have to watch out for the blue rhinos.

Yeah don’t think about blue rhinos either. 

[oznl]

On 9/16/2021 at 12:57 AM, Little Sherri said:

I was discussing this a while back with @oznl, with respect to trying to "achieve" not having to wake up at night to go.

For me at least (I’m working with a known sample size of ONE here), it was definitely falling asleep wet that was a necessary seg-way to sleep wetting.

It seems that the psychological barrier to wetting a dry garment in ones sleep for me was much higher that simply adding to its pre-existing humidity.

As you’d have seen from my blog, I spent months (possibly a year) vacillating in that “Did I or didn’t I?” space as the evidence for “Did” started mounting in VERY much the manner @Little Sherri is outlining, nappy dreams and half-memories.

Like Sherri, I tried to capture it for measurement on a few occasions but each of these efforts had exactly the opposite effect.  If I started to think about it, it didn’t happen.  I did some google-research on this and discovered that indeed WAS a thing: you can influence a subconscious behavior by attempting to bring it into conscious management.

I just went back to the space of going to bed a bit wet and using my nappy a little bit whenever I stirred during the night.

Over time, it seemed I was using my nappy less and less during the night.   But I wasn’t using it less and less.  I just wasn’t remembering using it all the time.

The going-to-bed-wet thing is like putting (un)training wheels on a bike.  Eventually you don’t need them and it’s kind of hard to put your finger on what changed or when. 

You need them, then you don't.

The memory I have of that night, a year or so after I thought it might have been sometimes happening, of finally having the opportunity of going to bed without a nappy and then waking up at 3am, utterly-sleep-bewildered as to why my pyjama pants were wet and stuck to me along with the sheets around me being damp and cold is very, very clear though.

To @Enthusi's point though: I often think that I'm not using my nappies and thus wasting them.  I am of course.  It's just that I don't notice as much.  It's also been a while since I can remember having a long comfortable wee under the sheets.  For the most part, I just deal with wet nappies in the morning.  At least I'm undisturbed by my bladder at night though.  THAT is no longer a thing.

[Sir Stinkypants]

On 9/15/2021 at 4:02 PM, Dragonmiss2013 said:

Yeah pink elephants are bad, but you have to watch out for the blue rhinos.

I’m picturing a pair of restroom doors, a pink elephant for the ladies and a blue rhino for the gents. Or maybe a line of diapers so decorated?

[dlnoir]

No not at all. I do not give it any thought, I wear diapers 24/7 and that is how I live my life. I wet my diaper without having control over it all by choice. This being the case it is not worth thinking about it any farther so I don’t.