Ideas to stop getting up for a pee in the night time - Stop nocturnal enuresis

It is not pleasant having to get out of bed in the middle of a very cold winter to pee.  Night time passing urine frequently is called nocturnal enuresis.  Particularly in the older  population, this can lead to trips and falls as well as increased confusion.  So the question is:  What can be done to stop getting up  so many times during the night?

Nocturnal  enuresis is, to be frank, a pain in the backside.  Whether it is cold, causing you to wake up tired in the morning or disturbing a partner, it is not pleasant.  Let me know what your experience is and if you have found a  solution.

The first thing I have found is:
Raising the head of the bed can significantly improve sleep quality for individuals experiencing nocturia. This adjustment helps in several ways:

Fluid Redistribution
  Decreased Nighttime Urine Production: Elevating the head reduces the amount of fluid that redistributes to the kidneys during the night. This can lead to a decrease in nighttime urine production, thereby reducing the frequency of bathroom trips.

Sleep Disruption
   Minimise Interruptions: By limiting the need to wake up frequently to urinate, individuals can maintain a more continuous sleep cycle. This is crucial for achieving deeper sleep stages, which are essential for overall restfulness.

Additional Recommendations

To further enhance sleep quality for those with nocturia, consider the following strategies:

  Elevate Legs During the Day: This helps process excess fluid before bedtime, reducing the likelihood of nighttime urination.
  Limit Fluid Intake Before Bed: Avoid drinking fluids at least two hours prior to sleep to minimise the need to urinate during the night.

By implementing these strategies, individuals with nocturia can experience improved sleep quality and overall well-being.

Information from Wiki and various university sites.

I have had sleep problems for a lot of years.

I bought Lavender Essential oil and Chamomile Essential oil and a warmer.  That has been the best buy of the century.

I have been reading "Breathe" by James Nestor, and nose vs. mouth breathing is actually a significant factor. I don't remember the details, but the way hormones are released between the two, the body of the nose breather will retain more water at night in the cells.

For us, it was one of the things we worked on to help kids with bed wetting, but I can see the value for this situation here.

Get checked for sleep apnea? - it keeps waking you to a level where the kidneys start producing urine. Two people I know who started wearing CPAP machines stopped getting up to pee.

Essentially, anything that might be disturbing your sleep, can contribute to the need to get up to pee. It could be outside noise or lights, a full moon etc.

I had always thought having to get up to pee at night was correlated with enlarged prostate (that organ being in the vicinity of the bladder, it takes up space the bladder otherwise would use, decreasing the bladder's capacity).

I've had some trouble with this, following an iatrogenic bout of prostatitis (don't ask, you don't want to know! - but it was rather unpleasant).

For other reasons not directly related to the prostatitis per se, I have tried to follow a diet which is anti-inflammatory: minimize commercial seed oils (surprisingly difficult to totally eliminate - they're very sneaky!), in favor of animal fats, olive oil and coconut oil; and minimize easily assimilated carbohydrates (refined flours, sugars, etc. - I do currently eat some legumes, especially chick peas, in moderation).  I eat very little fruit (from a cookery perspective, not a botanical perspective - I do eat tomatoes, curcubits, eggplant, etc.), and am even careful about how many carrots I eat.  But, I do eat lots (and lots!) of leafy greens and cruciferous vegetables.  Basically, I try to minimize blood sugar excursions, as a means of also limiting insulin spikes.  I am not diabetic (though, in retrospect, I may have been exhibiting some early signs of insulin resistance before all of this started), but I am trying to reduce the potential for inflammation.  I also take Vitamin D3 supplements (currently 10,000 IU daily) and K2 (100 micrograms daily); I am supplementing with oral D3 because I likely don't get enough sunshine to make my own (I try to stay out of the mid-day sun, since my mother died of malignant melanoma, and I have a lot of risk factors for melanoma, though all biopsies have been clean, just weird looking).  I have also pretty rigorously limited my fluid intake after 9PM (a couple of hours before my bed time), and I make sure to empty my bladder good and well just before clambering into bed.  I am also on a very low dose of tamsulosin; I'd like to try to wean myself off of that, but deep in the throes when this all began, it seemed necessary to keep the plumbing working.  Having had multiple relapses of prostatitis, I have been hesitant to mess with it, since keeping urine moving, with good voiding, can't hurt, but the opposite certainly could.

Within the past few months (so, beginning a couple of years after the start of this whole escapade), I've experienced a marked improvement in how long I am able to sleep (once, recently, until 7:30AM - crazy!) and the number of night time trips (rarely more than one, anymore, unless it was a really hot day, and I have overcompensated on rehydration; sometimes zero trips per night, for two or three nights in a row - woohoo!).  Most of the time, I am now sleeping until 5 or 5:30AM, sometimes until 6 or even 6:30, and even then, I may get coffee going and whatnot before I do what's necessary.  I may even need to start setting a morning alarm again, something I haven't found necessary for several years.  These days, if I do get up to make a trip, it's usually somewhere 2 and 3:30AM.  Most often, the cat wakes me up, or the neighbor's lovelorn cat is yodeling, or one of the neighbors is making his way home from the local watering hole, or some kids who should be in bed are still out playing hide-n-seek or flashlight tag, and I figure "well, I don't know if it's really necessary, but I might as well go take care of it, since I'm already up".  When this first started, I would be up - with urgency - 2 or 3 times per night on a good night, cat or no cat, and as many as 5 or 6 times on a bad night.  Hard to get much good rest that way...

I can't guarantee that any or all of the above would help you.  In point of fact, I'm not entirely certain what's helped me.  But, I am going to keep doing what I have been doing, for the foreseeable future, since it seems to be helping in various facets of my health, not least fewer night time trips and better sleep.