a scientific explanation for breaking the seal

urban dictionary defines breaking the seal as

The point at which you first piss after you have been drinking your favorite alcoholic beverage and at this point you will be pissing every ten minutes.

having experienced this phenomenon firsthand I wondered if there was a scientific mechanism behind it.

there is, and interestingly enough, you can train yourself to not urinate so often if you want.

this article is from the ABC of Australia website and deals with "Great Moments in Science." i am not sure why or even how this is great science, but it was interesting none the less.

the article states that

The bladder has a capacity of 500 mL (roughly a small carton of milk). The bladder, like the ureter, has various bands of muscle in its wall – spiral, longitudinal and circular. When the bladder empties, the muscles contract in a specific sequence, starting at the top and working down to the bottom. This wrings virtually all of the urine from the bladder. You get your first urge to pass water with a volume of 150 ml of urine, but usually this can be easily ignored. But it’s harder to ignore the marked sense of fullness that normally happens around 400 mL.

converting the volume into beers means that if you have a completely empty bladder and start drinking, you will start to feel as though you could urinate after one half of a beer (150 mL = ~5 fluid ounces) and you really have to go after finishing that first beer (400 mL = ~13.5 fluid ounces).

this seemed quite early to me to have to go to the bathroom, but it made more sense after reading:

The bladder is a hollow organ that is the reservoir for urine. Urine from the kidneys flows at about 1 ml per minute into the bladder, via the ureters. The ureters have walls of muscle arranged in spiral and longitudinal layers. Every 10-60 seconds, waves of synchronized muscle contraction progress down the ureters, pushing urine into the bladder.

so it would take 15o minutes for your bladder to fill to the 5 fluid ounce point, and 4o0 minutes to get to the "get out of my way" zone. this makes perfect sense because 150 minutes is 2.5 hours and 400 minutes is 6.66 hours, which means at some point around 3 to 4 hours after drinking you are going to break seal. i have found this fits in with my past experiences.

the article also goes on to point out a key fact

Then you have to sit back and literally hold on. Just like five-year-olds physically clutching their groin when they feel they are busting to do a wee, you have to cross your legs, sit down and distract yourself mentally in an effort to ignore the first desire to pass urine. Wait for it to pass, without rushing to the toilet. The idea is to gradually increase the time between each urination, and retrain your bladder back to registering that it is full only when it is actually holding more than 300 ml. This means you get bladder control back, and the bladder stops wrongly sensing fullness at tiny volumes of urine. For most people, this is enough to shift them back to relatively normal bladder habits, full night sleeps and being able to throw away their maps marked with public toilets.

moral of this post...the longer you hold it, the better off the rest of the night will be.

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