Dr. Trisha Pasricha

It sleeps at night.

It has a circadian rhythm.

When you wake up, the colon buzzes with activity for the first one to two hours upon waking, more so than most of the rest of your day.

There are a couple of things that can get the colon to start contracting on its own again later or around that morning time, such as going for a walk.

So a lot of people in the morning go for a walk outside.

They take their dog out.

A lot of people drink coffee in the morning.

Coffee will stimulate strong contractions.

And when you put all of this together, it turns out that in the morning, it is a really nice time to have a bowel movement.

That doesn't mean that morning time is the only or even the best time to have a bowel movement.

A lot of people very commonly have another surge of activity in their colon, those contractions, the motility ramps up after lunch and after dinner.

Those are also great times to have a bowel movement.

Whenever you can have a bowel movement that leans into your own physiology, meaning your colon is doing some of that work for you, it means you have to do a little bit less work.

You have to bear down less hard.

And the truth of the matter is that your bowel movements are determined by a little bit more than just motility.

They're determined by how soft the stool is.

And so sometimes I tell people like having one bowel movement a day is lovely, but your stool is determined by the consistency of that stool, is determined by your stress.

It's determined by whether you're traveling.

It's determined by whether you've decided there's a safe and appropriate bathroom nearby or not.

And frankly, once you start meeting your fiber goals, which is not the case for most of us here in the U.S.,