There are several possible treatments for urinary incontinence. The best treatment depends on the cause of your incontinence and your personal preferences.

Key points

• Most of the time, incontinence can be cured or at least managed.
• For stress incontinence, many women get good results from using Kegel exercises, timed urination training, lifestyle changes, and medical devices such as pessaries. You have the best chance of success when you stick with them. For difficult-to-treat stress incontinence, surgery can help. New surgical techniques are minimally invasive and can have quick recovery times.
• For urge incontinence, learning to retrain the bladder is often helpful. Medications may also help, although they tend to have bothersome side effects. Surgery is not considered an effective treatment for urge incontinence.¹

View and print a voiding log(What is a PDF document?) for keeping track of your symptoms.

Exercises and lifestyle changes

Pelvic floor (Kegel) exercises help 50% to 75% of women to decrease the occurrence of stress incontinence.³ These exercises, which strengthen the pelvic muscles involved in urination, are especially useful for stress incontinence, but may also help urge incontinence. Making sure you do these exercises correctly and doing them regularly are key in succeeding with this method.

Kegel exercises may be combined with biofeedback techniques to help you know whether you are tightening the right muscles. This can also be done by placing a finger in your vagina so that you can feel the pelvic muscles contract. Also, to prevent leakage when you feel a sneeze or cough coming, try a Kegel by tightening your pelvic floor muscles. Crossing your legs may also help.

Losing weight often helps stress incontinence.

Sometimes making lifestyle changes can help with urge incontinence. Try to identify any foods that might irritate your bladder-including citrus fruits, chocolate, tomatoes, vinegars, dairy products, aspartame, and spicy foods-and cut back on them. Also, avoiding alcohol and caffeine usually helps.

Behavioral methods

Three types of behavioral methods are used to treat urinary incontinence: bladder training, timed urination, and prompted voiding.

Bladder training (also called bladder retraining) is used to treat urge incontinence. With bladder training, you increase how long you can wait before having to urinate by trying to delay urination after you get the urge to go. You may start by trying to hold off for 10 minutes every time you feel an urge to urinate. Then try increasing the waiting period to 20 minutes. The goal is to lengthen the time between trips to the toilet until you're urinating every 2 to 4 hours.

Your health professional might instruct you to try timed urination if you urinate infrequently. You will urinate every 2 to 4 hours during waking hours, even if you feel as though you don't have to go. This method can be effective for both urge and stress incontinence.