Reminders for Managing Overactive Bladder and Bladder Training

Overactive bladder (OAB) affects millions of people, causing urgency, frequency, and sometimes urge incontinence. One of the most effective first-line treatments is bladder training — a structured programme where toilet visits are deliberately delayed and spaced at increasing intervals to retrain the bladder's capacity and urgency signals. The programme works, but its success depends on following the timed schedule consistently, which is hard to do without external prompts.

How Bladder Training Works

Bladder training typically begins with fixed toilet intervals — often every 60 to 90 minutes — regardless of urgency. Over weeks, the interval is gradually extended as the bladder learns to hold more. By the end of a 6–12 week programme, many people can achieve 3–4 hour voiding intervals with significantly reduced urgency.

The key requirement is adherence: you must go to the toilet at the scheduled time, not when urgency strikes (unless genuinely necessary). This reverses the habit of responding to urgency immediately — which reinforces the bladder's over-signalling — and replaces it with a controlled, timed pattern.

Without a clock or timer, maintaining the interval is nearly impossible during a busy day. People forget, give in to urgency early, or lose track of how long has passed. A phone call at each interval point provides the external prompt the training requires.

How Reminders Support the Training Programme

A phone call every 90 minutes — 'Bladder training: scheduled toilet break now, even if you don't feel urgent' — keeps the interval precise without requiring the person to watch a clock all day.

As the programme progresses and intervals extend to 2 hours, then 2.5, then 3, the reminder schedule is simply updated. ReminderIt allows you to set any interval and adjust it as the programme changes.

For people who find it difficult to explain to colleagues why their phone is ringing regularly, the reminder can be set to a discreet time-of-day message: 'Your scheduled break is now' — specific enough to act on, private enough for a work environment.

Medication Reminders Alongside Bladder Training

Many OAB patients are also prescribed antimuscarinic medications (oxybutynin, tolterodine, solifenacin) or beta-3 agonists (mirabegron). These require consistent daily dosing at the same time each day to maintain therapeutic levels.

ReminderIt can run both the bladder training interval calls and the medication reminder simultaneously from a single account — a complete support system for the full OAB management plan.

Set up at reminderit.com. No app required.