Dr. Trisha Pasricha

And then eventually your microbiome, again, trillions of bacteria, they're shedding, they're dying, they're living their best life.

A lot of that is gonna mush together with whatever's made its way down there.

And it's gonna form this nice compact patty.

That patty is formed because your colon has been sucking water out of that stool the entire time.

It'll make it to the last part of your colon called the rectum.

That's when you have a critical choice to make.

You can decide, is this a socially appropriate moment?

Do I want to make this happen?

And you can have a bowel movement or you can fight your instincts and clench your sphincter and hold on to it.

So whenever you make that decision, and sometimes your colon will really push you to make a decision quickly, you'll release it out into the free world and the digestive process will complete.

So we have it in our heads that we have to poop once a day, every day.

And I think that the reason that myth took flight is because there actually is a certain time of day when a lot of factors come together that prime us to have a good bowel movement.

So motility, when we're talking about the gut, refers to movement.

It refers to how the gut on its own with its muscles, and it's got a very thick muscle layer, is moving things in that motion all the way down from your esophagus down to your colon.

And when you wake up first thing in the morning, as it turns out, that's a time of day that we're actually really primed to have a bowel movement.

First of all, your colon, it's a creature of habit.

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.