Increasingly, I hear clients of mine mention offhand that they don’t get much sleep because they have to get up to pee frequently. I’ve also had clients who had irritable bladder, and I didn’t have any clue what that was about.
But recently as I’ve been doing research into breathing and breathwork and how important that is for regulating . . . . well, pretty much every single bodily process – it has stood out to me that carbon dioxide levels affect vasopressin levels which in turn affects how often people have to go pee.
Vasopressin is also known as “anti-diuretic” hormone. Anti-diuretic hormone causes us to retain water, and is stimulated by thirst, nausea, vomiting and pain. It acts to keep up the volume of fluid in the bloodstream at times of stress or injury.
This is interesting because to me, it means that the thirst, nausea, vomiting and pain of migraine may be an adaptive response by the body to retain water when it has become dehydrated. It could be that when a critical level of dehydration is reached, the body responds by raising vasopressin levels. And indeed, we do see elevated vasopressin levels are associated with migraine.
