Moom's cure for bashful bladder syndrome

This is rather personal, but as it's true and as it may one day provide relief for someone else I think it merits posting.



Bashful bladder syndrome, for those who haven't come across it, is the
name given to that experience many men have when they are desperate to
urinate, but when they finally get to a urinal find it difficult to do
the deed in front of others. Neal Stephenson described as being the
body's way of telling you that you need to "get off campus and go get a
fucking job", which rings strangely true, but doesn't really help.



My own cure is as follows: I stare at the bit of wall in front of me
and imagine that it is a landscape, and I picture myself in that
landscape. The grouting between tiles becomes a glacier valley, strewn
with ice and white pebbles; peeling paint becomes vast petrified waves
arcing up over my head.



The effort of imagining all this stuff means that my brain doesn't have
the capacity to exert its panicky grip on my bladder, which can then
gleefully get on with its own thing.