To pee or not to pee in the shower. It’s been a contentious debate since the invention of indoor plumbing. It’s inspired myriad articles and even an episode of Seinfeld, and now the age-old argument has leaked over onto TikTok.
According to In the Know, a doctor on TikTok is warning against peeing in the shower, though users on the video-sharing are not so ready to ditch their bathroom habit. In a video to her 469K followers, Dr. Alicia Jeffrey-Thomas, a certified pelvic floor physical therapist explained why the shower isn’t the wisest place to urinate.
“If you pee in the shower, or turn on the faucet or turn on the shower and then sit on the toilet to pee while the shower is running, you’re creating an association in the brain between the sound of running water and having to pee,” she said.
This is what’s known as classical conditioning, “a learning process that occurs through associations between an environmental stimulus and a naturally occurring stimulus.” As Jeffrey-Thomas touches on in her video, the findings of this behavioral mechanism were first discovered by Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, who conducted his now-famous experiments with dogs. Pavlov would ring a bell every time he served the dogs food, and after enough repetitions, he observed the dogs would salivate in response to the sound of the bell, even when no food was present. A similar subconscious link, Jeffrey-Thomas explains, can occur for avid shower pee-ers: the sound of running water and the need to relieve oneself can become intertwined, causing some “leak issues” down the line.
Peeing in the shower is also particularly bad for people with vaginas, whose pelvic floors aren’t designed for peeing in an upright position.
“From a pelvic floor perspective, the position for peeing in the shower is not conducive to pelvic floor relaxation,” Jeffrey-Thomas explained to Buzzfeed. “AMAB (assigned male at birth) bodies have the prostate to support the bladder, which makes standing to urinate okay, but AFAB (assigned female at birth) bodies — as well as people who have had affirmation surgeries — do not have the same level of support for the bladder.”
“Your pelvic floor isn’t going to relax appropriately,” she adds in the TikTok. “Which means that you aren’t really going to be emptying your bladder super well.”
Though, judging by the comments section, despite this informative and likely sound medical advice, TikTok users are probably going to keep peeing in the shower:
“I quite simply don’t care also this didn’t happen to me so I’m good lmao”
“I mean, I appreciate this a lot, but im probably not gonna stop”
“I’m just tryna save water it’s not that serious”
For what it’s worth, that last user has a point.
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