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It’s hard to imagine there are many people who own a cellphone who don’t whip it out to distract themselves during an extended trip to the bathroom. However, a new study suggests you might want to rethink that habit unless you happen to be a huge fan of hemorrhoids.
It’s kind of wild to think there are some people who will never know what it’s like to live in a world where people taking a a lengthy pit stop on the toilet had to rely on shampoo bottles, tattered copies of Reader’s Digest, and (if you were lucky) kitschy joke books that were published for the express purpose of being placed in a bathroom if they needed a distraction.
We now live in a world where you can post up on the porcelain throne and continue to doomscroll to your heart’s content without missing a beat thanks to the phones that have become the primary form of bathroom entertainment, but they’ve also made it pretty easy to spend more time perched there than you intended (or need) to thanks to the wide variety of ways you can get sucked in nowadays.
Overstaying your welcome may seem like a fairly harmless habit at first glance, but that may not actually be the case.
A new study claims that using your phone while you’re sitting on the toilet can increase your risk of developing hemorrhoids
Anyone who’s had to deal with hemorrhoids at some point in life would probably prefer to avoid a repeat bout with the ailment that’s primarily linked with excess pressure being exerted in your nether regions during a bowel movement (in layman’s terms: pushing too hard while you’re pooping).
That’s not the only contributing factor, as hemorrhoids (which is the fancy medical term for an enlarged vein down there) can also form if you simply spend too much time sitting on the toilet. As a result, it doesn’t seem like a stretch to suggest that using your phone while doing your business could play a role in their proliferation—an assumption new research seems to support.
According to a paper that was published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS One earlier this week, a study concerning 125 adults who responded to a survey they were given in conjunction with a colonoscopy found there was a link between cellphone use on the toilet and the presence of hemorrhoids that was hard to ignore.
Researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, which served as the site of the study, said 66% of respondents admitted they regularly use a smartphone on the toilet, with 37.3% of them saying they typically stayed there for at least five minutes (compared to just 7.1% of non-phone users who said the same).
43% of the people surveyed had hemorrhoids detected during the colonoscopy, and after crunching the numbers and controlling for other factors, the study found those who admitted to using their phones were 46% more likely to fall into that group.
You’ve been warned.