{"id":221171,"date":"2025-09-12T15:19:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-12T15:19:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/221171\/"},"modified":"2025-09-12T15:19:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T15:19:10","slug":"doctors-can-tell-if-you-scroll-on-the-toilet-heres-how","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/221171\/","title":{"rendered":"Doctors can tell if you scroll on the toilet. Here\u2019s how."},"content":{"rendered":"

Sign up for the Slatest<\/a> to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.<\/p>\n

If you bring your phone with you to the bathroom, you\u2019re very normal. You\u2019re also at risk of developing hemorrhoids\u2014swollen veins in the anus and lower rectum that can cause pain and bleeding\u2014according to a study<\/a> that came out last week. Of the 125 adult participants in the study, two-thirds reported smartphone use during bathroom visits. Subsequent colonoscopies revealed that those bathroomgoers had a 46 percent higher risk of hemorrhoids than those who didn\u2019t use their phones. It\u2019s not the phone itself causing problems, of course, but the fact that it often prolongs a visit to the toilet.<\/p>\n

This probably isn\u2019t news to you. The purported health risks of extended loo time have long circulated through doctors\u2019 offices and news articles. \u201cDon\u2019t Sit on the Toilet for More Than 10 Minutes, Doctors Warn,\u201d read a CNN headline<\/a> in 2024. \u201cWhy You Shouldn\u2019t Sit on the Toilet Longer Than 15 Minutes,\u201d a Men\u2019s Health article<\/a> explained in 2016. Gastroenterologists have been advising a five-minute limit to their patients for as long as study co-author Trisha Pasricha can remember. \u201cIt\u2019s what I heard when I was in training from the GI docs who were teaching me, and I kept saying it to my patients,\u201d says Pasricha, a gastroenterologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of what most people say.\u201d<\/p>\n

The scientific literature on the issue, however, is scant\u2014just<\/a>\u00a0a\u00a0few<\/a>\u00a0studies<\/a>, the largest of which relied on hemorrhoid self-reporting rather than evaluations, which makes the results less reliable. (\u201cThere\u2019s all kinds of other things that we just don\u2019t think about that can be a little lumpy and bumpy on our butts that are actually not hemorrhoids,\u201d Pasricha explains.) That\u2019s what led Pasricha\u2019s team to conduct this new study\u2014and why the results were something of a relief. After all these years, \u201cit\u2019s nice to finally have data to offer patients,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Given the finding, I can\u2019t help but think: Man, do we all have hemorrhoids? Because people have been guilty of prolonged toilet sits<\/a> since, well, there were toilets. \u201cRoman baths contained libraries wherein one could pore over scrolls, and \u2018The Life of St. Gregory\u2019 (1296-1359) recommends the isolated retreat of the medieval fortress toilet \u2026 as a place for uninterrupted reading,\u201d wrote Henry Alford in the New York Times<\/a> in 2006. In the 1700s, Lord Chesterfield wrote about a \u201cgentleman\u201d friend who read the Latin poets \u201cin the necessary-house,\u201d Alford notes. In the early 1800s, before the invention of toilet paper, people relied on pages of their reading material\u2014typically The Old Farmers\u2019 Almanac<\/a>, which, in 1919, started including holes in the corner so it could be hung in outhouses and bathrooms. In 1979, jokester Jack Kreismer saw the vision for a line of books marketed specifically for use in the bathroom, and his Bathroom Library<\/a> series burgeoned into a whole line of bathroom-reading-specific products (some might recall Uncle John\u2019s Bathroom Readers<\/a>); of course, Reader\u2019s Digest<\/a> was another bathroom staple. When no form of entertainment was available, we turned to the text around us, pretending to be interested in, hey, what is in this tube of toothpaste<\/a>. Now we have smartphones. At this point, we\u2019ve all more or less looked hemorrhoids square in the eye and decided it was worthwhile. Right?<\/p>\n

    \n
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    Not quite. While we don\u2019t have long-term data on whether the length of people\u2019s toilet trips has changed over the years, we do know that smartphones are addictive<\/a> in a way that books, crosswords, and shampoo bottles simply aren\u2019t. \u201cSmartphones are so different from other reading material,\u201d says Pasricha. \u201cThey are designed to maximize how much time you spend on them.\u201d If you\u2019re reading the funnies, you\u2019ll eventually run out of funnies, and bathroom-reader books tend to be short by nature (which, at least for Kreismer, was never about keeping bathroom visits brief, but rather a happy coincidence of the genre). But TikTok and other social apps have no end. Part of the reason I use the phone on the toilet, I think, is to limit my phone usage time. If I lie on the couch to scroll for a few minutes, it could easily turn into an hour\u2014but on the toilet, I won\u2019t be caught lingering. Right? Except, inevitably, people do.<\/p>\n

    That happens to be perhaps the most important finding of the new study, Pasricha says. Not that smartphone users are more likely to get hemorrhoids, or even that smartphone users were five times more likely to spend more than five minutes on the toilet than nonusers. Rather: The fact that 65 percent of the smartphone users were not aware of how much longer they were spending on the toilet because of the phone. \u201cTime is distorted when you\u2019re staring at these screens,\u201d says Pasricha. \u201cIf it\u2019s highly engaging, you so quickly lose grasp of what you\u2019re doing.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Indeed, a recent survey<\/a> showed that it\u2019s the phone-savvy younger generations that are spending the longest on the toilet\u2014and we really don\u2019t know yet what effects that will have on the body. It might not just be hemorrhoids: Over the long term, smartphones could lead to changing the very dynamics of our pelvic floors, suggests Pasricha. It\u2019s something her team is looking into, and she hopes others will as well.<\/p>\n

    <\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/p>\n

    \n Dan Kois
    \n We Must Go Back to Our Old Way of Passing Time While Pooping
    \n Read More<\/b>\n <\/p>\n

    <\/a><\/p>\n

    As American novelist Henry Miller<\/a> once wrote, delightfully, some text is elevated in the loo: \u201cThere are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet\u2014if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.\u201d I would argue the same about certain TikToks. So don\u2019t worry\u2014you don\u2019t have to give up the long tradition of bathroom reading. But consider how you might incorporate that five-minute limit. You might set a timer (can\u2019t you just see a bathroom-timer feature in the next version of iPhone?), or try to keep yourself to a two-TikTok limit. Maybe dig out your old Reader\u2019s Digests, or prepare a new bathroom library<\/a>. And if you\u2019re one of the 42 percent of Americans<\/a> who go to the bathroom just to get some alone time? \u201cYou don\u2019t necessarily have to, like, pull down your britches and then sit on this unsupported, open toilet bowl, if what you really want is just a moment of relaxation and zen,\u201d says Pasricha. \u201cJust put the lid down.\u201d<\/p>\n

    <\/p>\n

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