Back in 1994, Unca Cece addressed the phenomenom of "piss shiver," the uncontrollable shivering that sometimes follows urination. Sad part is, the conclusion of that report was less than inspiring, amounting to, “we don’t know anything about it.” He promised to eventually rope in the SDSAB on the issue.
It’s been 14 years now. Any news from the SDSAB on piss shiver? Is it solved? Do we know what causes it? Has anyone experimented?
I mean, 14 years, man! Y’all gotta have gotten up off the floor by now from that last party!!
Well… The SDSAB has a long list of topics to tackle, but since we’re unpaid (and since some of us are lazier than others), we each pick and choose the topics we want to handle. It’s not like they’re assigned. This one, I guess, no one felt like trying to deal with. So, as far as I’m aware, no one is actively working on it.
Are you volunteering to write a “guest report,” DS?
As long as the invitation was cordial I’ll add that, after some experimentation, I have found a way to simulate the ‘piss shiver’ without urinating at all!
My suspicion is that the muscles that one uses to stop the urine stream involuntarily contract as one finishes voiding the bladder. Exercises for these muscles are available for addressing issues of incontinence, but I first heard of them as a way of intensifying orgasm. I think what is happening is that the contraction of the muscles triggers a brief mini-orgasm response.
I know that is not original and I pretty much made it up just now, but I did give myself about 5 self-induced, non-micturitional ‘piss-shivers’ just for fun, so it was worth it.
for what it is worth…
I am 61 yrs old and have not had the experience for many years now
I still have full function of all other experiences without the aid of any medication
If memory serves me…and at my age it may not…but I think the “piss shivers” are more common place the younger you are and fade as you age…just my antedotal experince…your milage may vary…
Rick
I am very convinced that the piss shiver is a mild case of hypovolemic shock.
In my youth, I was a phlebotomist at a plasma center. That’s a place where people have whole blood drained out through a rather large needle (a phlebotomy) in a vein. The plasma is separated from the red blood cells and the red blood cells are returned. When I started, we took the blood out in bags, sent them back to the lab, where they were centrifuged and separated and the whole blood returned in the same bag. Nowadays, they do it all in an individual machine with disposable tubing and separators, and there’s not nearly as much blood out of the body at any one time. The process nowadays takes about 45 minutes. Back in the old days it took 1 1/2 to 2 hours
Invariably there were people who couldn’t quite hold their water for that whole two hours and they’d beg us to pull their needle let them go and they’d come back to get restuck and get their blood cells reinfused after relieving themselves. We phlebotomists hated doing this, because not only did we have to restick them, but we had to escort them to the restroom and watch them very carefully and closely because (and this is why we hated it) at least 25% of them would pass out with their junk hanging out squirting pee all over the place.
These people were suffering from hypovolemic shock: Low blood volume. They were already iffy due to the loss of blood from the donation. But that sudden collapsing of the bladder was offset by blood rushing in to fill the space (not the bladder, but the space the full bladder had previously occupied), was enough to cause a sudden drop in blood pressure, thus unconciousness.
I remember asking the doctor at our center if this rash of fainting was hypovolemia and she agreed wholeheartedly. Think back to your last piss shiver and ask yourself if it was anything like the “head rush” you can get from suddenly standing up? That’s hypovolemia also.
Now I’m not a doctor, and I don’t even play one on TV. Ask your doctor friends if this theory gives them a shiver.
It’s not though. The head spin caused by standing too suddenly is caused by the sudden drecrease in blood pressure in the neck. It has nothing to do with hypovolemia, hence the reason why it can occure when there has been no loss of blood volume, and the reason why it self corrects without any blood volume being added.
I am 64, and it’s also been decades since I’ve experienced this… I had completely forgotten it ever happened. Even when I was younger it was infrequent, but it sure does seem to go away with age.
The answer to all of this is quite simple. I recall over 50 years ago when I was just out of diapers, my mother would help me “take aim” at the toilet. As I was about to finish, she would tell me, “… And now God is going to make you shake like a bunny rabbit.”
That should just about cover the question and the answer!
Shuddering is a strange behavior that is more a figure of speech than something we experience. Nevertheless, it’s a brief shaking in response to something disgusting or offensive (ie, “I shudder to think…”). Why does it happen? Some sort of primitive animal communication? But if so, what for?
Anyway, we shudder after we piss because pissing is disgusting. It doesn’t make much sense, but shuddering never does.
I asked the director of my neuroscience course, and he said he wasn’t entirely sure. However, his reasoning on the matter was as follows:
The autonomic nervous system (the one you can’t specifically control) governs minute-to-minute management of the body’s fluids, among other things. It has two general divisions: the Sympathetic system (aka “fight or flight”) and the Parasympathetic system (aka “rest and digest”).
Under normal conditions, the Parasympathetic system governs bladder constriction (making you pee) while the Sympathetic system governs the urinary sphincters (keeping you from peeing). When you decide that it’s socially acceptable to pee (or, at least, good for a laugh), you voluntarily withdraw Sympathetic stimulus, relaxing the sphincter and letting the urine flow out of the bladder.
During micturition, your bladder may empty more rapidly than is normal (maybe you have to go really bad, or you’re trying to squeeze out that last stream). This may induce a spinal reflex that kicks the Sympathetic system into (a low) gear, causing involuntary sphincter constriction and collateral shivering, another Sympathetic response (to cold). A similar collateral Sympathetic reaction is sweating when you’re hypovolemic (like after giving blood).
This might explain why the PMCS is (apparently) an affliction of young men, who may have a higher Sympathetic response than women or older men.
I had thought that the gender-differential of PMCS might involve some difference in urinating while sitting versus standing. Since then I’ve found that position has little noticeable effect on whether or not I shiver.
Really? Pissing is one of the most sublime pleasures known to man. Not as intense as orgasm, but of the same level as a good sneeze, belch or fart; but not to level as a well formed bowel movement. My disgust is reserved for matters truly deserving of it.
Maybe my terms aren’t precise. I have more of an engineering background than medical. But wouldn’t low blood volume (hypovolemia) cause low blood pressure? As with the head rush, there’s a sudden decrease in blood pressure due to standing up (because the heart suddenly has to pump harder to maintain the original blood pressure in the brain). With the piss shiver there’s a sudden decrease in blood pressure due to blood filling the body space previously occupied by the full bladder.
Sorry, I’m standing (however shakily) by the hypovolemia theory.
Low blood volume can eventually lead to low blood pressure, but not in the simple quasi-engineering sense you’re thinking of; the pressure comes from the heart and the subsidiary pumping action of the arteries, and the system is mostly self-adjusting, unless and until it starts to break down.
Well yes, but you the obverse is not true; low blood pressure doesn’t have to be caused by low blood volume. All corws are black birds, but not all balck birds are crows.
In the case of sudden standing the drop in blood pressure is caused entirely because of a lack of tension in the blood vessels. It’s totally unrelated to blood volume. In fact if a person were suffering from hypervolemia the problem would probably be even worse.
Why did people responding to my post have absolutely nothing to say except some vague, general disbelief? Care to actually make an argument?
People occasionally briefly shake in response to disgust or something similar. E.g. The American Heritage Dictionary defines ‘shuddering’ as “To shiver convulsively, as from fear or revulsion.” For some reason people don’t talk about shuddering in modern times (it’s just so Victorian, like fainting) and many have forgotten about it, but I’m sure you’ve all experienced it. I get it most repeatedly when I’m clearing nasty phlegm from my throat. It’s usually something i’m not thinking about, but it can also occasionally be triggered by something ‘conscious’, like looking at a woman with some really bad cellulite. Now I TOTALLY AGREE that the act of pissing isn’t disgusting in a conscious way. But I find it impossible that the general phenomenon of shuddering-in-response-to-revulsion and piss shiver aren’t intimately related.
Actually, ‘piss shudder’ returns twice as many results on google than ‘piss shiver.’ ‘Shudder’ and ‘shiver’, despite distinct connotations, are mostly interchangeable words. In any case, wtf kind of argument is that? “You’re wrong because we’ve been calling it something else.”
