A Urologist Shared The Single Question He Asks Every Patient, And It Can Reveal A Lot About Your Health

“The bladder needs to contract on its own — it’s a muscle on its own, not connected to anything else,” Larish noted. “So if you’re farting, that means that you’re using abdominal musculature, right? You’re increasing the entire intra-abdominal pressure in order to squeeze on the bladder. So I tell people, if you find yourself farting in order to initiate a pee or in order to get the last third of your urine out, there’s something going on that needs to be evaluated.”

Ultimately, Larish’s advice for keeping all things urologic as “nice” as possible boils down to just a few tips.

“[You] should be thinking about nothing when [you’re] peeing,” he said. “It should be blank Zen. That’s the golden rule. I think you want to be hydrated, but not overly hydrated. Everything has to be in moderation. Not overdoing it with supplements, if they’re not necessary. Being tuned in to your body is probably the most important part. If you see that something has changed, like, ‘I haven’t woken up at night in 20 years to pee, and in the last three weeks, I’m waking up three times a night to pee, and it’s really disruptive,’ yeah, that’s a big difference in baseline. That’s abnormal, so something is happening. And if you have changes to your body that you’re attuned to, then getting an expert opinion and figuring out if there’s an issue is a reasonable thing to do.”

We also chatted about why some people are pee-shy (and how to help overcome this feeling), whether urine is truly sterile, whether you should drink it if you’re marooned on a desert island, and much more.

Need some help with something you’ve been doing wrong? Email us at AmIDoingItWrong@HuffPost.com, and we might investigate the topic in an upcoming episode.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost.