Don't remember the details but the Mythbusters tested this. I think this was the episode.
this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2026
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My 'theory':
Your sphincter and other pelvic floor muscles functionally work together to hold your pee in.
You actually have two sphincters, the external one is skeletal muscle and is controlled voluntarily/directly by you most of the time, the internal one is smooth muscle, that you generally cannot consciously control, its on autopilot.
When you really need to hold your pee in, your sphincters get more active, and start to get tired.
The muscle groups near them, they basically try to do load balancing, by shifting you around into other configurations that make it easier for the specific muscles to be able to hold your urethra shut.
Thats why you find yourself, or may be directing yourself, (EDIT: or a kind of confusing combination of both), to reorient/reconfigure your pelvic muscles, to basically 'help' your sphincters be able to hold on a bit longer, by finding a mechanically less demanding pose for them to assume, that still keeps the gates closed.
Think of how if you're carrying something heavy for a while, you'll tend to try and shift to a different way / configuration of carrying the thing, that uses different muscle groups in different ways, if a particular muscle group is just way too exhausted.
Combine that with a built in biological / genetic understanding that you are vulnerable to attack when urinating/defecating, and you get a subconscious element or autonomic element of the nervous system that switches into this behavior mode, to prevent you from letting loose untill you are somewhere safe to do so.
I don't know, but while we're at it, I'd be interested in this related observation:
in cases like when i reeeally need to go, my ability to guess when exactly i will be at the right spot seems to affect my ability to hold it in. as if my body is only going to do as much effort holding it in as necessary but not more, while the idea of "necessary" can be "negotiated" by lying to my body.
imaginge this typical scenario: you sit in the tram, legs crossed, then you are running home, now you are opening front door, now you are quickly running to the bathroom and just about make it. doesn't it always feel like you just about made it? like there's never a reserve?
now if one extra inconvenience stands in your way (eg. oh, turns out today for some reason you put your keys in your backpack instead of your front pocket!) then it becomes this critical moment of disagreement between your body and your brain: you can either just pee yourself or hit the emergency break to override and hold it in anyway which makes it almost painful and may even sort of "push it back", which i reckon is not a healthy thing to do.
at the same time, i've learned that I can actually prevent this from happening by "lying" to my brain early on and overestimating the exact time it will take before we are ready. like, i imagine my house is one block further. or I imagine that there's construction and we need to take a slightly longer route. or that i have my keys in a wallet on the bottom of my backpack.
this lie tends to work, surprisingly, calming the whole reaction down and (unless there actually happens to be construction or another inconvenience that negates it) make the whole thing much more manageable.
Your nervous system has finite bandwidth. The extra movement and sensation signals drown out the "need to pee" signal, making it seem less urgent. It's also why we rub the area around minor injuries to relieve pain.
You can actually test this pretty easily!
Have you ever walked out of a dim building into sunlight so bright it hurts? Well, each eye has a max limit of how much it can hurt, but your brain combines the pain from both eyes.
If you close one eye, you cut the pain signal in half.
In my unscientific experience, if I'm on the go as in walking, the piss can be kept in for an hour and more. If I stop, I don't think willpower alone will prevent me from pissing myself. So the dance is probably simulating the conditions of being too busy for a toilet break.
makes evolutionary sense. you’d be at a disadvantage if you need to pee when there’s a predator about. better to learn to hold it and run.
Not really, it's well known that animals tend to shit and piss, dropping the weight and encumbrance, right before executing on the fight-or-flight response. People are likewise prone to soiling themselves in fear. So idk why it's the other way around when just going on my walks, but I'm not gonna complain about it when my city doesn't have many public toilets open at night.
i'm not an expert but I don't think that the panic response invalidates it. it could still be advantageous to refrain from doing 1 or 2 all over the place just to not make it easier for predator to detect you, i guess. When in fight/flight mode it's already too late so better get rid of the weight and also probably disgust or confuse the predator a bit.
Exactly, this depends on the circumstances. E.g. cats tend to bury the waste so it doesn't smell, while other territorial animals piss on everything in sight to mark the land. Nevertheless, when an animal is jumped by another, they often drop deuces all over while hitting the road dramatically. There's a recent-ish clip on Reddit of two hippos fighting, wherein one of them decided to do the helicopter distribution of dung in the middle of the altercation.
My guess? At some point an actor on stage had to show the audience that the character really need to pee. Whatever movement they did evolved to the dance we have now over generations. We don't do it because it helps but because it's what you're supposed to do.
I'd be surprised if it was consistent across cultures. I'd not be surprised if someone had done research on this.
To support this and fun fact.
I saw pandas make faces and try to break their food(bamboo) using their knee. They dont need it, they are very strong. They do it because their human handlers do it. They have copied this behaviour.
Sometimes they forget to make faces and break the bamboo and do it afterward when they remember it.
I have seen lots of small kids do the movements in different ways, even before they would plausibly have seen the stereotypical dance in media. There is definitely a biological component to it; bending slightly and moving does seem to strengthen the muscles that hold in the pee.
I agree that more research is required. Perhaps the Ignobel Prize could commission some research, since they will probably be awarding the people who do it anyway.
An official IgNobel grants scheme, btw, seems like it might attract a lot of crowdfunding from interested shitposters from all over the internet. I'd definitely throw in a hundo every year.
Because the director tells us to, so people can see our discomfort without having to say "I really really really need to pee."
Flight or fight.
Your bodies reaction to any adverse stimuli is always the same.