Diaper-centric

In humans, and in many other species, the body system which controls the voiding of bodily waste is adapted such that it is under voluntary control. However, the means by which that control is maintained require it to be maintained through use. If it isn't used, it erodes.

Untrainers actively target this, by actively refusing to use their control and by adopting strategies which will allow their body to void with minimal physiological effort. People who want to wear and use their diapers 24/7 (henceforth "24/7ers") obviously don't actively seek to lose their control. However, using diapers 24/7 means they will increasingly generally be in a situation where not using their control is a convincingly better choice and/or using it is convincingly worse.

Here's a hypothetical. It's based heavily on my experience but is not a direct factual account; it's also heavily simplified because I'd have to either do anonymisation or worldbuilding otherwise and I'm not going to do either of those things.

Say you're a college student. You have a very predictable college administration, and because of that, four days a week, you have:

a 9–11 AM lecture

an 11 AM–12 PM interval

a 12–2 PM tutorial, with no break in the middle

You have a chance to snack, hydrate, and get a coffee in the interval. As a result, you consistently have the problem of realising, about 30 minutes into your 12 PM tute, that you need to pee.

This is a problem. See, in most places, excusing yourself to pee is a neutral act, but in college, there is an expectation that you'll stay in the room unless you absolutely have to leave. Not usually an overwhelming one, but present in the same way that getting up constantly to pee at a movie theatre is somewhat more frowned upon than doing so while watching the same movie at home.

So, what do you do? Well, if you're continent, or at least wearing underwear, the answer you're pressured toward under those circumstances is just holding it for the remaining 90 minutes. Sure, it might be annoying, but if you have normal continence it's not likely to be so distracting that you can't willpower through it. If you're wearing diapers and have decided to use them, however, none of this logic applies. Short of any other intervening factors too complex and individual to be listed here, if you feel the need to pee 30 minutes in, there's no reason not to pee 30 minutes in.

The effect of this is obvious: that's 90 minutes you're not exercising your control when you otherwise would have. That's not much, but you can never have just one potato chip, as the saying goes. For instance, you also realise that you've been feeling the need to pee about 30 minutes into your morning lecture. You haven't really been thinking about it because that one does have a break at 55 minutes and it's a lot easier to wait until then. But why wait?

And so this continues. This hypothetical person is based on me so it would probably be pretty reasonable to nominally divide their day into 3 blocks of 8 hours each:

college and related things (studying on-site, commuting, etc.)

home and related things (work, study at home, free time, etc.)

sleep

(No, I did not get anywhere near that much sleep; yes, the non-college-time block was a lot bigger than that for me.)

Out of your college and related things block, when you level out you're probably holding it for maybe 50% of the time you were before, on average. So you're effectively holding for at least 4 hours fewer out of 24 per day, 4 days a week: –16 hours out of 168 per week, total.

Still not a lot, but it builds up. For instance, I think at this point we can safely assume you're still dry at night and your continence behaviour during sleep is the same as it was before you started wearing full-time. But most people at least initially find it easier to start using their diapers at home and in other familiar places, where nobody has any reason to watch them. So at home the amount of time you were holding it had already been maybe half what it would have been before. Another 4 hours' worth of non-use of control, 4 days a week, making –16/168 h/w, for a total of –32/168 h/w.

On the 3 days a week you're not at college, we can safely move the 8 hours a week that would have gone to "college and related things" into "home and related things", the block during which you're only holding for about half as long as you were anyway. So that's 16 hours total, so that's 8 hours fewer of control on each of those 3 days; 8 × 3 = 24, making a total of –(32 + 24)/168 = –56/168 h/w.

But wait! All that practice you're getting wetting your diapers at college, where you're nervous about it, is helping tremendously with wetting your diapers at home and other places where you're more comfortable. So suddenly instead of holding for 50% of the original length of time at home you're holding for 25%. Then 10%. So now that 8 hours of control not being used is 14 hours 24 minutes (× 3 days a week) and now it's –75.2/168 h/w. And it continues to add up.

And of course you can respond to this by saying, well, I want to wear diapers 24/7 but I know I don't want to lose my bladder control, so I'll simply pee at the same time I normally would have. Which makes perfect sense, but also, that's an abstract long-term commitment, and it's now competing with things like the visceral discomfort of needing to pee increasingly for 90 minutes, when you know you don't have to be experiencing that discomfort. You have to really care about the thing you're committed to for it to serve as the bulwark of your self-discipline in that kind of situation. And even then, there are probably going to be days when you're going to give in, because the machine didn't have mocha iced coffee today, it only had double espresso, and now your eyeballs are swimming.

And you can say, well, I'm not going to need to avoid peeing for 90 minutes, because I will simply do other things, like not have water and coffee directly before my two hour tutorial with no break. To which my answer is, sure. Water is necessary for brain function, caffeine is addictive. Yes, it's plausible that you'll give up one of those, but the path of least resistance is the one where you wet your diapers because it's the one where you get everything you want (staying in the lectures, wearing diapers, using diapers, drinking coffee, drinking water).

And all this discussion of self-discipline and paths-of-least-resistance is ignoring the positive disincentives against using your control. For example: When we pee in a toilet, we tend to release it all at once and as quickly as possible. In most diapers, that's not advisable. The superabsorbent polymer can't absorb that much liquid that fast; the inside of the diaper will flood and leak.

Diapers obviously can absorb a lot of liquid given enough time, so the first thing to address is flow rate. Flow rate is determined by volume (that is, if there's more pee you need to void, you will pee faster). Therefore, the way to pee at a lower flow rate is to pee when there's less pee in your bladder. The kidneys produce urine at a rate which is strongly predicted by your diet and medical conditions, so if those are relatively stable then your urine output will be too. In that case, the most effective way to pee when there's less pee in your bladder is to pee frequently. In short, diapers literally discourage you from holding your pee and encourage you to pee as close as possible to when you feel the urge.

And then, of course, there's the fact that the map is not the territory, and the view from the top of a mountain differs from the view from the bottom of the adjoining valley. Decisions about maintaining continence and responding to continence failures that are made prior to going into diapers 24/7 are made in one context. Decisions about the same matter that are made well into the process, when the things in question are or might be actually happening, are made in another context entirely. And there are obviously factors other than immediate short-term discomfort or utility that dictate what choices someone makes.

This makes sense; they're texts compiled by volunteers on a taboo subject considered psychopathological and deviant, they're not guides on general pedagogy. Because of this, however, they often convey the impression that the fundamental learning content of the program is the series of conscious actions the guide is telling you to take — the "drill-and-practice," as the Twelve Month Diaper-Training Program puts it.

The thing about reading it that way is that control isn't mediated only by the conscious, but also by the unconscious: the system of mental processes and reflex actions that are still happening even when you're not thinking about them. This is annoying because you can only directly modify the conscious mind, but the unconscious supersedes it and limits what it can do. For instance, you might be consciously aware that "no control" means "no control around judgemental authority figures who make you nervous". You might resolve to make sure you void more freely around those authority figures. But though you can take other actions to indirectly reduce your anxiety, you can't simply make a direct conscious choice to stop feeling nervous, or to at least feel relaxed enough to void. Hell, you might get hit with a bad case of inverse latchkey phenomenon, your brain actively suppressing your urge to void because it feels so strongly that the situation is not an appropriate one in which to do so — in that case, the point is moot; you never even get the chance.

Because of that, it becomes obvious that the learning content of untraining isn't just consciously learning the actions that you need to take and then learning them as habits through practice, but also subconsciously learning that those are actions that can be taken, and learning to make them accessible as options to your conscious mind. The drill-and-practice isn't the content; it's the alphabet in which the content has been written. It's not the learning; it's what allows the real learning to begin.

The point of untraining is to void unconsciously and without control. The impression one often gets is that the initial acquisition phase, during which you become fluent in the drill-and-practice, is where you learn how to do this. But that can't be the case. Why? Because the acquisition phase is, by definition, conscious. Sure, when you're very fluent, you may not be consciously choosing when and where to void any more, but that's only because you're consciously choosing to void when- and wherever. It's still a conscious choice.

That doesn't mean that no change is happening. On the contrary, it absolutely is — your unconscious habits and maybe the physiological state of your muscles are certainly changing. But the cruel irony is that the more deftly and quickly you master the routines, the less clear you are likely to be that you have done so. Why? Because the system you're trying to sabotage is its own monitor. To know your control is weakening, you have to be using it. If you are constantly using 0% of your control then you have no way of knowing with any confidence whether you could use 100%, or 50%, or 20%; it will all feel exactly the same.

What this means is that while the initial acquisition phase does involve learning new habits and muscle memory, it doesn't even get started on the broader psychological reorientation that embeds untraining, because it can't. It can't challenge your fundamental assumptions about being someone who has control, because while thoughtless, habitual voiding is a controlled action and unconscious voiding is an uncontrolled action, all other things being equal they are not perceptibly different in any way, to anyone, including the person doing them. When you start untraining you will likely perceive yourself as someone who has full control and subsequently form a coexisting perception of yourself as someone who is very good at choosing to void, and it is quite possible for this perception to continue to exist long after it ceases to be meaningfully true, because there is nothing to actually cause it to change.

This very inertia of self-concept, however, lays the groundwork for that psychological reorientation to begin. See, the initial process of acquiring the routine might not provide conscious reason to reevaluate your instincts, but it does begin the process of subconscious change, meaning that even though your conscious idea of what you might instinctively do in a given situation has had no reason to change, eventually your actual instinctive behaviours in that situation diverge from it. When you notice this divergence, it creates a tension which allows conscious change.

For instance, suppose you are in the "shy bladder around authority figures" example situation described above. You will probably continue to consciously perceive yourself as having this problem. Eventually, however, your unconscious will have adjusted enough that it is no longer a problem, and you will probably notice. When you do notice, this will cause your self-concept to change.

This is a specific situation. Your self-concept will be more resistant to change in other areas. For example, if you want to lose messing control, but are scared of doing so, you are likely to continue holding onto the idea that you are someone who has messing control. However, your instinctive behaviours will still change based on what you do and what you want to do, so the divergence will intensify over time. When the divergence intensifies enough, the basic framework of believing you will do one thing and finding out that you will actually do another has an easily recognisable name: having an accident.

Accidents and other events founded in the same principle are incredibly important parts of the learning process of untraining, because incidents you cannot predict either allow or compel you to learn things that you may very well want to learn, but, for whatever reason, cannot choose to (because you are expected not to, or because you are afraid to, or because you simply don't know the thing is there to be learned). In occurring, they disproportionately expand your knowledge and competence specifically because while you understand what you are going through you have no prior expectations of how it should go and can therefore extract the maximum value from the data.

Here are some useful ways in which accidents contribute to untraining. These seem to intensify toward the point of no practical control, a concept I recently discussed describing a point at which, while you might theoretically have a degree of control (maybe even quite a high one), it is compromised enough that in practice you have to act exactly as if you had no control at all.

They actively impair control. It is an excellent rule of thumb that all other things being equal, someone will be more able to do something if they have confidence that they can. Confidence is based on, among other things, previous performance. Impaired control will impair the individual's confidence in their control, which will impair their control further, and so on in a slow downward spiral.

They bypass the ladder. It's true that it's often difficult to void if the situation places you under too much of a certain type of stress. It's also true that with time you can become acclimatised to certain situations. However, if you start out with a bunch of situations in which you can't use your diapers until you've incrementally worked your way up to tolerating the stress, your untraining and possibly even just your 24/7 in general are going to be considerably hampered.

It's also true that when it seems noticeably difficult to use your diapers in a particular situation, using them in an even more difficult situation can relieve that anxiety by making the present situation seem trivial. For instance, at the point where I started voluntarily filling my diapers, my wetting control was noticeably shaky but present after about six months of wearing diapers. By about three months after I started messing my diapers, my wetting control was pretty much nonexistent.

Having accidents pretty much at random means that you are going to have accidents in situations that, at that time, are much more stressful than you would ever choose to void voluntarily in — but it will also, with any luck, mean surviving them, not finding them frightening any more, and finding a lot more of the world accessible as a result.

They force you to get over being seen. Anyone who's spent significant time in the AB/DL community will know we have something of a psychological split. There are people in the community who are outright exhibitionists to the point of being unethical. Perhaps in reaction to that, the mainline AB/DL code of ethics can be approximated as more or less complete secrecy: no one must ever know.

I'm definitely closer to the secrets camp than the exhibitionist camp. However, I'm also an AB/DL/IC person who has experience being treated as simply IC. There was an expectation that I as an IC person would be discreet, that I would want to be discreet, and that I would be considerate. There was stigma, sure, but there was no expectation that I would maintain complete secrecy at all times, to everyone, because that would have been unreasonable — there was only an expectation that I would take reasonable precautions. I'm a big fan of impact over intent in my analysis, which in this case leads me to feel that people doing the same things I did should have the same leeway I had regardless of why they were doing it.

The thing about the AB/DL code of ethics is that if you've strongly internalised it, as I had for a while (I still have, but I feel less shame about it), it kind of merges with your control. If you have control then you don't void where people can perceive you. As I entered my ambiguous choosing-not-to-hold/can't-actually-hold phase of control, I mentally revised this to taking active precautions: "if you void in a way that people can perceive then you immediately get the hell out of Dodge".

Accepting that I was having accidents also led me to the realisation that in circumstances where I could have an accident literally anywhere at any time, obsessively trying to actively preserve my secrecy as a matter of policy was stupid and unviable. It meant switching to sensible, sustainable passive precautions: better diapers, better waterproof pants, more appropriate clothing, etc — and accepting that there was a limit to what I could do and I couldn't possibly reduce the probability of being clocked to 0.

I think as a result of this one or two people found out who probably would have found out six months to a year later had I just fled, and one or two people found out who would otherwise never have found out at all. And, conversely, I am pretty sure there are dozens of people who never found out who would have.

They move the locus of control. There are certain expectations of how wetting and messing should be handled in a civilised society; consciously controlling your bladder and bowels are central to societal narratives about how those expectations can be met. Therefore, for as long as you believe you have control, when you can't satisfy those expectations (the most common example being when you have a diaper leak), you are prone to, on some level, attribute blame to not using your conscious bladder and bowel control. For obvious reasons, attaching guilt and shame there inhibits your untraining.

However, when you no longer believe that you have full conscious bladder and bowel control, it is less appealing to blame diaper-related embarrassment solely on your failure to use that control because it is less clear that using your control could have averted it. Consequently it becomes much easier to step back and diagnose other points of failure in the system. When the problem is I wet my diaper and it leaked, instead of immediate first reference to I should not have wet my diaper, it becomes much easier to situate the problem outside your bladder and your use of it: instead it becomes I should have changed earlier or I should have used more absorbent diapers or I should have worn better waterproof pants or I should have worn a onesie.

The core problem is that wearing diapers encourages wearing them more and using them, and using them encourages wearing them more and using them more.

In these circumstances,

Wearing diapers means wearing them more

This is driven by the fact that pretty much everyone likely to get into this situation wants to be wearing diapers full-time, even if their purpose for wearing them is, just as you say, "fun"; nobody who's genuinely content with 30 minutes of diapers a day and does not want to wear them any more is going to get into this situation. It can be assumed in pretty much 100% of cases where this is relevant that the person would prefer to be wearing 24/7 and simply sees themself as unable to.

Wearing diapers is simultaneously the process of mapping out the constraints on your ability to wear them. If you wear them for a certain amount of time and there are no adverse consequences, then you have no reason not to wear them more. However, if there are adverse consequences, they are likely to be intervenable, meaning you can change things so that next time you are in the same circumstances the same adverse consequences do not arise. Presumably you do this, and so the next time you are in the same situation, the same adverse consequences do not arise. Therefore you have no reason not to wear diapers more, and so on.

Wearing diapers means using them

Part of this is the quite simple and elementary statement that obviously you're more likely to use diapers if you're in them because you can't very well use them if you're not in them. The other part is that diapering (and thence using diapers) beyond a certain very low level imposes switching costs on toileting and not being diapered, while the reverse doesn't apply.

Before we go on I should explain what I mean by "beyond a certain very low level". Most of the statements in this answer don't apply to pull-ups. However, most people, regardless of what they normally wear, don't use pull-ups as their primary form of diapering; whether they normally wear underwear or normally wear heavier diapers, they usually treat pull-ups as a special case of underwear, so pull-ups aren't really considered for the purposes of this answer. It should be noted that people who actually use pull-ups often end up using heavier diapers as their mainstay, so pull-ups could be considered an onramp to the feedback loops being discussed, but aren't in the loops, per se.

A switching cost is the expense or disadvantage incurred by switching from one alternative to another. Not being in diapers doesn't impose a switching cost on diapering — for it to do so would require a fundamental alteration in the nature of causality; as it is, once you're done not being in diapers, you can simply get into a diaper. Similarly, toileting doesn't impose a switching cost on diapering; once you're done using the toilet, you can immediately put a diaper on.

Using diapers means wearing them more

Diapering does impose switching costs on not being in diapers. For a very minor and inconsequential example, if you change out of a diaper into underwear, certain diaper hygiene products are liable to permanently stain your underwear. If you don't have immediate access to a shower — for example, you are not at home — and you change out of a wet diaper into underwear, then no matter how conscientiously hygienic you are, you are liable to smell faintly like pee; ironically, simply changing into a dry diaper and then not wetting it would probably control the odour better. If you are changing out of underwear into a diaper, you will have no trouble slipping your underwear into some corner of your diaper bag; if you are changing out of a diaper into underwear, you have to find some way to either store or dispose of the diaper (this would also be the case with changing from a diaper into a diaper; the point is that with moving from underwear to diapers the underwear does not impose a nontrivial amount of labour on you, whereas the diaper does if you move in the opposite direction).

Diapers also impose switching costs on toileting. If you pull down your diaper to sit down or to pee standing up, you are liable to have it stretch out of shape. If you untape it the tapes may very well not re-stick (even if they are supposedly refastenable). If you pick only diapers that have neither of these problems, you are liable to run into the problem of low cost-efficiency, meaning you will be stuck with diapers that are either cheap but low-performing, namely pull-ups and their cousins (like Depend Adjustable Underwear, RIP) or high-performing but expensive (like any Bambino diapers with Ultrastretch). Toileting means either spending a diaper or wearing bad diapers; if you are also using your diapers then the problem intensifies, because you have more of a reason to care whether your diapers are well-performing and cost-efficient.

Of course, you could wear cloth diapers, but firstly it would be a bit odd for a casual wearer in my audience to wear cloth diapers, and additionally: they're expensive, making it financially painful to buy them if you don't intend to use them; cloth diapers that are substantial enough to be used as diapers are fairly bulky, meaning those who buy them are most likely to be people who have less to gain from not using them; and, due to waterproof pants and (where applicable) pins, they're a mechanical hassle to get on and off. Depending on the diaper, its mass might also necessitate a onesie to hold it up, adding to the mechanical hassle further.

If you're in diapers, therefore, and you don't have the immediate use of a body-washing facility such as a shower (either in terms of physically being able to access it, or in terms of the time to use it) — which is going to be the case for almost everyone some of the time — you are incentivised to continue wearing them instead of switching back to underwear, and incentivised to not use the toilet, which implies either holding it or using your diapers. If you don't hold it and do use your diapers this incentive framework is reinforced further.

This has an erosive effect on control because control is developed to facilitate voiding at a time and under circumstances of your choosing, and is maintained by a societal structure which incentivises you to void under certain circumstances and at certain times. Wearing diapers flattens out the objective preferabilities of different circumstances and times with regard to voiding; i.e., wearing diapers makes it so that, across a reasonable measurement period, it makes little to no objective difference when you void [note 1].

This nullifies the aspect of "choosing". For example, if you are peeing in a toilet then in terms of achieving this aim it is clearly objectively preferable to pee within the toilet cubicle with your pants down, and clearly not preferable to pee in the garden with your pants on, and therefore you choose the former. However, if you are peeing in a diaper, then there is no difference in objective preferability between peeing in the toilet cubicle with your pants down and peeing in the garden with your pants on, so there is no choice to make.

There will still be differences in the subjective preferability of given circumstances for voiding. However, once the objective differences have flattened out to zero, this is going to be basically a matter of your residual internalised social expectations about when it is appropriate to void.

In any given situation, you are going to choose to either hold it or void. If you feel that something bad is going to happen if you choose to void, that will weigh in favour of you holding it. However, that may cause you to get to the point that you feel it's preferable to risk it and void, rather than continue holding it. This eventuality may consistently fail to arise in instances of the given situation; however, over enough instances of the situation, it will eventually arise (everyone needs to void real bad sometimes).

If something bad does happen, then your aversion to voiding in that situation will be increased. However, that just perpetuates the loop because you will once again likely come to a situation where you need to void urgently enough to overcome your aversion even though your aversion has increased.

If something bad does not happen, then your aversion to voiding in that situation will be decreased because you learned that your internalised social expectations are wrong and voiding in that situation actually has no effect whatsoever beyond relieving your need to void. Ironically, because of how diapers work, voiding at a lower level of urgency decreases the chance that something bad will happen, making it a self-reinforcing effect.

This learning loop has the capacity to apply to all forms of voiding across all situations. Factors limiting the situational preferability of voiding are almost always intervenable. For example, messing when fully untrained and adapted to having no messing control is generally a much less dramatic process than messing when fully continent. This phenomenon has an observable gradient effect between the two extremes, because the factors that underpin it still apply to different extents at different points on the gradient. For instance, being fully adapted to messing generally requires specific dietary choices; if you want to keep your messing control but want it to be easier to mess, you are still likely to make some of those dietary choices. This in turn will make it less problematic to mess in a given situation, and so on. Eventually, through the operation of looping processes like this, there will be minimal difference in the objective and subjective preferability of voiding in almost all situations.

But this doesn't compel you to lose control, right? I did say that using your diapers in a given situation will ultimately come down to pushing through your subjective discomfort in doing so. By the same token, you could choose to push through the switching costs of toileting and continue doing so. Well, sure, but not so fast. There are a number of points to consider.

Using diapers means using them more

The first point is that voiding in your diaper and voiding in a toilet are, in economic jargon, rivalrous: if you choose to do x of one, that's x less that you can do of the other. If you were peeing in a toilet three times a day and are now wetting your diaper twice a day, you can probably only pee in a toilet once that day. Of course, it seems like you could do three of each by simply doubling your fluid intake, but that's fundamentally changing the starting conditions (and also you should not be drinking so little that doubling it wouldn't be drinking too much).

The second point is that the costs of voiding in a diaper are not materially quantifiable, and the costs of voiding in a toilet are. You may spend significant effort and focus on voiding in your diaper, but you will spend 0 cents. On the other hand, if you are in a $2 diaper, it's 0% used, and you have to make it unusable in the process of voiding in the toilet, you just blew $2 of value. If it's 50% used, you just blew $1. Over time, every use of the toilet while diapered becomes a sharp reminder to use your diaper instead, in the form of a sharp prod to the hip pocket.

The third point is kind of an extension of the first: just as voiding in a diaper and voiding in a toilet are rivalrous, diaper-oriented voiding behaviour and toilet-oriented voiding behaviour are rivalrous. Moreover, diaper-oriented voiding behaviour has an erosive effect on control because it reduces the average and aggregate time you spend holding.

This is easiest to explain through a model. Let's say

you have some sort of external routine to your day — college or work, doesn't matter

it's an 8-hour day

you have 2 types of time allocations: rest periods, during which you can pee, drink water, and do other things, and work periods, during which you can't [note 2]

you have 3 major 40-minute rest periods alternating between 3 work periods that are 120 minutes in length, and the first major rest period comes before the first work period because you like to arrive early

the work periods contain toilet breaks, minor rest periods of 10 minutes in length (last 5 minutes of the first hour, first 5 minutes of the second)

during each major rest period you drink enough water that you need to pee starting 15 minutes into the next work period

Let's also say that you are wearing underwear and toileting. This means the first time you will get to pee is 40 minutes later at the start of the toilet break. You will be holding it for 40 minutes, 40 minutes, and 40 minutes, for a total of 120 minutes and an average of 40 minutes.

Let's now say instead that you are wearing diapers but have different subjective preferences about how much you would like to pee during each work period. Let's say that during the first and third work periods you are fine with peeing where you are, but during the second work period maybe you're sitting next to someone whose opinion you're worried about, so you wait until the toilet break. This means you are holding it for 0 minutes, 40 minutes, and 0 minutes, for a total of 40 minutes and an average of 13 minutes 20 seconds.

Of course, this is going to feed back into the subjective preferences I mentioned above — where you might feel you need to go badly enough to risk it. If you are holding it you are going to feel urgency. If you have to hold it for 40 minutes and your control is optimised to hold it for an average of 40 minutes, you will feel such and such a degree of urgency, the reference degree of urgency u. However, the urgency you feel is determined by the degree of your control relative to the demand on it. If you have to hold it for 40 minutes and your control is optimised to hold it for an average of 13 minutes 20 seconds, you are going to feel a degree of urgency >u (greater than the reference degree of urgency). This means that after long enough optimising to hold for 13 minutes 20 seconds and trying to hold for 40 minutes, you will probably eventually find yourself uncomfortable enough to say "fuck it" and give up on the 40 minutes. Which means you will now be optimising for 0 minutes.

The fourth point is that, as I mentioned above, subjective preferences about voiding are altered by its outcome: if you void and nothing bad happens, the weight of "something bad will happen" as a decisional factor against voiding is decreased because you both relieved your sense of urgency and learned that nothing bad happened as a result. The thing is that this happens regardless of your intention regarding voiding because, as with all other things, if literally all other things are equal then intention has no bearing on the psychological effect of the outcome. If I go out not intending to spend the extra money on a chocolate bar and then someone hands me a free sample, I don't feel bad simply because I originally intended not to buy a chocolate bar.

What this means is that accidents also teach you it's okay to use your diaper, which is significant because the more you become accustomed to routinely immediately using your diaper and optimising your control for doing so, the more likely you are to have accidents because breaks from routine are an unavoidable fact of life. Let's say you are at a point in your life where your control is optimised to hold for 10 minutes. One day, a 40-minute special occasion takes place — maybe a C-suite executive takes a 40-minute tour of your site — and you feel like you need to hold the whole time. Because your control is optimised for 10 minutes, you don't make it; you accidentally wet yourself at 25 minutes.

It's almost certain that you are not going to suffer an adverse event as a result of this, because if your control is unstable enough to have accidents then your diapering routine is likely such that you are not particularly in danger of leaking at any time, and you are likely having relatively small voids which you may be using your remaining control to try to close off. Therefore you learn two things from this:

You were not in more danger from wetting your diaper on the special occasion than you would have been under ordinary conditions;

You were not in more danger from wetting your diaper before 40 minutes than you would have been from wetting it after.

The fifth point is that accidents cause more accidents, because continence, like many other things, is affected by confidence. Confidence doesn't matter much if you have 100% control, where you will almost certainly exhibit functional continence under all circumstances, including those where you feel like you can't. It also doesn't matter much if you have 0% control, where you will almost certainly not exhibit functional continence under any circumstances, including those where you feel like you can.

In the middle, it matters a great deal. It matters in terms of abstract cognition: if you want to make it and think you can make it, then you will think it's worth investing the effort to try. If you don't think you can make it, then even if you want to make it, the return you expect on your investment will be 0, so it's logically not worth the effort to try. It also matters subconsciously: if you both feel you can make it and feel it is urgent that you do so, then you are more likely to be able to tap into that reserve of emergency strength. On the other hand, if you don't feel you can make it, then the fact that it's urgent is irrelevant, and your control is likely to give out sooner, which, in turn, will make you feel you were right that you couldn't make it, feeding back into the effect.

Diapers exacerbate this further because they insert a complex task you have to undertake before you can use the toilet. This can be explained through an analogy. Say you're doing a timed challenge which requires you to reach a certain destination by doing certain tasks. Say you reach 10 seconds from the end and you think it's plain sailing, then you run into another task which you know would take you 5 seconds to complete under normal conditions. Your confidence that you can reach the end will be diminished even though 5 seconds fits fine into 10 seconds and in fact is half the size of it. Your ability to complete the task will also be diminished because for the entire 5 seconds you'll be thinking about how you only have 10 seconds left, which might distract you enough that it takes 6 seconds, or that you stuff it up completely and have to spend the next 5 seconds doing it again, so you don't make it to the finish line and you lose.

This is basically what diapers are. You are less likely to be able to deftly undo your diaper quickly if you're frantically trying to undo it and feel like your eyeballs are swimming, which means that even though you need it off faster, that need makes it slower. Worse, it's obvious that if you were toileting regularly while wearing diapers, you could have developed the habit of accounting for the additional time, but if your control is unstable enough that the additional time matters, then you aren't likely to have been toileting regularly and therefore are unlikely to have learned to account for the additional time.

The effect depends on things like your subjective capacity for control (the effect strengthens as your subjective control weakens) and the amount of time you've spent in diapers (the effect strengthens as your time in diapers increases) because it depends most directly on the relationship between the complexity of getting out of your diapers and the degree of control of which your body is capable. The less control you have and the more complex it is to get out of your diapers, the stronger the effect will be.

This is easiest demonstrated by an example. Let's say you have a degree of control x, which under the conditions under which you usually exist is reliably just enough time to get to the toilet and pull down your underwear before voiding in the toilet. If you typically wear underwear, you will make it. If you typically wear a diaper you may or may not make it. If you typically wear two layers of diapering, waterproof pants, and a onesie, you will never make it. Even though someone less prepared for an accident would make it to the toilet, your preparation for having an accident will cause you to have an accident.

The sixth point is that control issues tend to colonise. Say your toilet at home is one minute away at all times; it takes you one minute to get there and you never need to wait to use it. If at work you are constantly optimising your control to hold for 40 minutes, you are never going to have problems reaching your toilet at home. If at work you are constantly optimising your control to hold for 0 minutes, you are eventually going to have problems reaching your toilet at home.

Managing these problems will mean instantiating the same feedback loop at home that was eroding your control at work, eroding it further. Moreover, phenomena which arose in certain contexts at work will continue to apply in different contexts at home. If your control is heavily optimised toward 0 minutes' holding, you are going to develop nocturia (frequent night-time urination) and you will have to decide whether to deal with it by going to the toilet six times a night or by wetting your diaper in bed. If you feel comfortable wetting anywhere you are probably going to wet your diaper in bed and will likely eventually develop bedwetting as a result.

The seventh point is as discussed previously on this blog: types of control are interdependent because they both rely on the pelvic floor. Typically, this shows up through loss of wetting control affecting messing control. If you display 100% diaper-oriented voiding behaviour with regard to wetting, but 100% toilet-oriented voiding behaviour with regard to messing, it won't matter; if your wetting control decreases then your messing control will also decrease, albeit to a lesser degree.

The eighth point is that once all the factors dictating the relative objective preferability of voiding in various situations have ceased to be relevant, the remaining factors, the subjective, are largely social, primarily the expectation of social stigma. The main relevant factor in that case is shame, which can be quantified as the magnitude of incident disapproval (how much disapproval everyone directs at you) multiplied by the subjective stigma sensitivity factor (how much you care).

Shame can be qualitatively described as the internalised expectation of adverse consequences. If consequences fail to manifest then shame becomes less indicative and less relevant to you and you become less sensitive to it. The degree of felt shame indicates the degree of expected consequences; the greater the magnitude of incident disapproval or the degree of your sensitivity to it, the greater the degree of expected consequences, and the greater the degree of desensitisation if they fail to manifest. This means that, all other things being equal, more socially stigmatised events that attract no adverse consequence have a greater desensitising effect than less socially stigmatised events.

This is important because both wetting and messing operate in the same direction along the social stigma dimension, and, all other things being equal, messing is more stigmatised than wetting, but it's also equally subject to basically all of the factors noted above.

As a result, if you're already struggling with wetting control, the arrival of issues with messing control is liable to trigger your wetting control to completely collapse because the only thing propping your wetting control up is differences in the subjective preferability of various situations with regard to wetting, and the subjective preferability difference profile of messing makes that look small and irrelevant by comparison. Accidentally wetting your diapers might seem like the biggest problem in the world when it's the biggest problem you have, but when you start accidentally messing them, accidental wetting becomes a sideshow.

Summary

Accidental untraining can occur because:

most people who wear diapers enough for accidental untraining to be a risk would prefer to be wearing them as much of the time as possible;

the more time they wear diapers with no adverse consequences, the more time they feel free to wear diapers;

wearing diapers encourages continuing to wear them and using them because it imposes switching costs on wearing something other than them and using something other than them;

this erodes control because control exists to allow you to void at a time and place of your choosing and is maintained by your doing so, and diapers take away the reasons to choose to void at one place or time over another and therefore the element of choice;

voiding in your diapers and not experiencing adverse consequences increases your willingness to void in them again, but experiencing adverse consequences doesn't break the loop because you will eventually run into a situation where you're willing to risk the adverse consequences for relief, and that relief itself is perfectly capable of not having adverse consequences, restoring your willingness to void;

the costs of learning to use your diapers are not materially quantifiable, the costs of not using them are;

the more willing you are to void in your diapers, the less time you will spend holding on average, and the less time you spend holding, the less time you will be able to hold;

control depends partly on you feeling that it is not OK to void in a specific situation, but whether a voiding in that situation teaches you that it's OK to void is unaffected by whether you intended it (i.e., your failure of control undermines your control further);

accidents cause more accidents because your control depends partly on the belief that you can prevent voiding, so you are more likely to have an accident if you believe more strongly that you're going to have an accident, and you're more likely to believe that if you've already had accidents;

a lack of control increases the probability of accidents not only because it increases the probability of continence failure but because it increases the complexity of getting out of your diapers, meaning what might have been a successful toileting out of diapers turns into an accident in them;

a substantive lack of control doesn't stay in the context in which you nurtured it and will eventually lead to loss of functional control in other contexts;

either type of loss of control increases the probability of the other type of loss of control because they both rely on the pelvic floor;

messing issues tend to trigger a collapse of wetting control by making the subjective preferability differences between wetting in various situations seem irrelevant.

Notes

On an instant-to-instant basis it does make some objective difference. For instance, it is clearly preferable not to void when you're about to leak. However, if you are using your diapers, over time you adapt your choices and behaviours so that the probability of leaking is constantly minimised, so that, across a reasonable measurement period, the weight of "leaking" as a factor in determining objective preferability of voiding flattens out to zero.

At what point does “wearing frequently but not 24/7” start trending into more dangerous territory

I'm going to be a pedant about wording — I know what you meant but it may be less clear to the couple of dozen people who will read this.

24/7 expresses two quantities. "24 hours per day," which we might call duration, is one; "7 days a week," which is probably closer to frequency per se, is another. Another useful metric might be their product, hours per week (hrs/wk), which for 24×7 would be 168 hrs/wk; let's call that quantity diaperedness.

I think the least-diapered regimen which has a chance of endangering your control is "wearing diapers only outside the home, but using only diapers whenever wearing them". For most people, the activity that takes them out of the house will be either study or work, so "only wearing outside the home" is likely to come out to somewhere between 6/4 (24 hrs/wk) and 10/7 (70 hrs/wk) for most people. The chance of developing control issues certainly scales with the absolute numbers — the person averaging 70 hrs/wk in diapers is much more likely to develop control issues after a year than the person averaging 24 hrs/wk.

However, in this case, the most important part is the underlying mechanism. The median country for mean residential square footage is France, at approximately 145 sq m. In a 144 sq m home, you are virtually guaranteed to be within 12 m of a toilet (in contrast to, e.g., my last workplace, where the distance from my station to the toilet was ~50 m). While at home, the chances are also significantly higher that you will be able to use the toilet immediately upon feeling the urge to void.

"Wearing only outside the home, but using" usually means you are diapered for fewer than 7 days per week and for less than half of your 24 hours per day, and indeed may be diapered for less than half of your 16 waking hours per day, so it's quite easy for it to feel safe. However, it eliminates virtually every reason you might need to use your control for more than a few minutes at a time. If the endpoint is "not being able to hold it for more than 5 minutes," "never holding it for more than 5 minutes because you never need to" won't get you there anywhere near as fast as "never holding it at all," but it will certainly move you in that direction given consistency and time.

what can be the possible effects of just “wearing often”?

There are direct and indirect effects.

The most prevalent direct effect I've noticed is simply "subjective experience of more effortful control," which is relatively innocuous — if you ask people to hold it for, say, an hour, someone who reliably wears and uses diapers will feel a lot more stressed at the end of that hour than someone who doesn't.

Slightly less prevalent is "failure of bladder control due to diverted attention". This is sort of an accident, but not really — it's more that "never having to hold it for more than 3 minutes" implies a routine where you can usually switch task focus immediately to going off and voiding, so you never need to incorporate it into multitask. As a result the mental routine of "consciously maintaining control while also primarily directing conscious attention to something else while needing to pee" gets rusty, and you absentmindedly forget to maintain control until five seconds later when you realise why you should have.

Over longer periods (i.e., generally >1 year), the effects tend to shade into "actual loss of the substance of continence," but in a different way and at least initially to a lesser degree than untraining.

The most prevalent direct effect in this category is probably "introduction of limitation of continence". Most people who are fully continent will feel on one or more occasions in their life a sufficiently intense need to void that it feels like their control is about to fail, but it's usual for them to make it to the toilet without their control failing. For people who are functionally continent but reliably wear diapers for a significant number of hours per week, it's not unusual to experience, for the first time, their control actually failing because they tried to hold on too long or because it was placed under additional load by an external stressor.

It's difficult to know what to call this because, at least initially, it usually doesn't represent an impairment of continence in practical terms — you might wet yourself if you try to hold it for longer than two hours, but realistically if you want to access a toilet you will almost certainly be able to do so within two hours of needing to. On the other hand, most people can hold it for longer than two hours (discomfort aside), so clearly some substantive change has actually occurred.

The next most prevalent direct effect is probably "failure of bowel control under influence of external stressor". The proximate cause is the application of external stress (e.g. raised intra-abdominal pressure) to someone's bowel control, although if they've already been holding it for a while, that doesn't help either.

Of the people I know who've worn diapers regularly but not 24/7, none have gotten much past this point without either choosing to stop wearing diapers or, voluntarily or otherwise, going 24/7, so it's difficult to know what the further direct effects are.

The indirect effects are the effects which develop from the direct effects and your response to them. The big nexus of concern here, of course, is lock-in: an initial loss of continence which is relatively insignificant in its own right but creates the conditions for further loss of continence.

Mechanical lock-in, extensively discussed on this blog, is one relevant form. It is circumstantially dependent. If you lose just enough control that a sufficiently strong IAP spike will cause a messing accident, but you work a sit-down job from home and have a sedentary lifestyle, it's unlikely to have a meaningful effect. If you work an on-site job with heavy lifting and you have extracurriculars requiring physical activity, however, you are probably going to have to both upgrade your protection and extend the amount of time you spend protected, causing more toileting failures, ultimately likely leading to worse control.

Psychological lock-in is also a factor here. Remember that one factor in the ability to exercise control is the confidence that you have it. There are many people for whom their first messing accident will be a bit of a shock, but not an earthquake. However, I know a few people who were long-term non-24/7 regular diaper wearers who had basically fine control out of diapers prior to their first few messing accidents, after which their general control started to fall apart quite fast and they ultimately found it necessary to go 24/7.

Assuming you start untraining with wetting untraining, there is a long period during which

your actual objective underlying bladder control moves from "easy, thoughtless, but still technically conscious wetting" to "wetting which is easy and thoughtless because it's actually unconscious and you don't meaningfully have the ability to stop it"

your subjective experience of bladder control remains largely the same, i.e., easy thoughtless wetting with an unclear degree of control

Of the attempts I have seen to retrain (i.e., to regain continence after untraining), the vast majority that achieved virtually perfect, as good-as-new success, happened during this period; basically, the person lucked out and managed to start retraining before they were deep into "unconscious wetting" territory.

After the point where unconscious voiding is clearly established (which, for many people, becomes evident at the onset of bedwetting), retraining seems to be considerably harder. There are a few factors and phenomena playing into this.

Destabilisation

I don't have a full theoretical workup on this topic, but significant loss of continence generally seems to preclude full and/or durable recovery of continence, with the degree of impairment worsening with the degree of continence lost and the amount of time spent without it.

The "fullness" of one's continence, here, is multifactorial: it includes

endurance: the amount of time for which one can reliably exercise one's control without failure;

start control: the fraction of one's voids which one consciously initiates;

stop control: the fraction of one's voids which one can stop through conscious control when attempting to do so;

stress control: the resilience of one's control to systemic shocks such as sudden increases in intra-abdominal pressure.

In my experience, an example of how significant loss of continence precludes full recovery of continence is that the optimal achievable outcome available to people who retrain after the onset of bedwetting seems to entail largely unaffected bedwetting and consistent but relatively shaky bladder control, which in almost all cases seems to include impaired stress control and often also includes impaired stop control.

The "durability" of one's continence is simpler; it refers to the reliability with which, and the duration for which, one can maintain one's "fullest" post-retraining degree of continence over time.

It isn't unusual — it is in fact arguably usual — for retrainees' control to take the shape of a parabolic graph. Let x = time and y = "fullness" of continence. The point at which someone starts retraining is obviously at less than full continence, so let's assign it an arbitrary negative y-value, say y = -10. While the range of input x-values (i.e., the time it takes this process to play out) varies, it's quite normal for someone's continence to climb gradually, through active retraining, to their peak continence (say the x-axis, y = 0, for full control), then equally gradually fall back down to and past the original y-value. This process seems to happen regardless of original or ongoing conscious intent.

Funnily enough, this actually seems more likely to affect people who were originally fully continent. Friends who have had, e.g., impaired but toilet-compatible bowel control while out of diapers, and then worse bowel control while in them, seem more likely to be able to claw their way back to their original level of bowel control and stay there. If on the other hand I hear that a friend who was originally fully continent but ended up as a bedwetter has managed to retrain, I generally expect that they will be back in diapers within 3–5 years.

Splash damage

Regardless of a person's conscious intentions going in, continence loss of any type, particularly significant "milestone" events in continence loss, seem to be associated with the onset or acceleration of continence loss of other types.

For instance, the onset of bedwetting seems to be associated with a sharp decline in most or all of the continence "fullness" variables described above, with respect to daytime wetting. That is, it's not unusual for someone to be able at a point 2 months before the onset of bedwetting to maintain functional daytime wetting control (keep their pants completely or almost completely dry) if out of diapers, while, at a point 2 months after the onset of bedwetting, having significant trouble keeping their pants even only a little bit wet.

Similarly, unintended messing accidents (i.e., messing accidents not taking place in the context of a desire or attempt to untrain messing) are very rare before the onset of bedwetting, while being much more common in absolute terms (although still, at least initially, relatively rare) after it.

Logistics

Retraining typically requires easy, guaranteed, unobstructed access to a toilet; the ability to focus attentively on your body's voiding need signals; and the freedom to chance wetting (or occasionally soiling) your clothes.

For a lot of modern adults, this simply isn't really possible; only people working from home with flexible hours reliably have all of these things. People whose workplace de facto completely controls their schedules and who have a high proportion of contact hours (i.e., have to spend a lot or all of their working hours on site) often work in a context where maintaining a routine that permits retraining simply isn't possible, and they have to rely on protection instead.

Part of this is a concept I discussed recently, mechanical lock-in, where one's control might be impaired in such a way that one can still usually reach the toilet, but accounting for the times where that isn't the case requires one to use protection and adaptations the nature of which significantly restrict one's ability to use the toilet.

TL;DR