Dr. Trisha Pasricha

We notice them as a problem.

But they've kind of been there the whole time, and they sit in your anal canal.

And when they become engorged, we call them hemorrhoids, and they become a problem.

So when you're sitting in that open bowl without any kind of counterpressure,

Over time, you do that for weeks, even years, and people are using their smartphone from the day they were born.

That connective tissue will weaken and those veins will fill.

And we think that's why it puts you at increased risk of hemorrhoids.

And so we asked this in our survey.

We said, okay, how often or how many of you are sitting there in your toilet longer than you intended because of the smartphone?

So not only did we find that people who brought their smartphone in...

Even if they had equivalent amounts of constipation between the non-smartphone user and the smartphone users, they were five times as likely to spend more than five minutes in the bathroom.

And about half of them said, yeah, I am consciously aware I'm spending more time in there than I intended to.

I tell people try not to spend more than five minutes.

So neurogastroenterology, which is my field, and that's the study of the gut-brain connection, it has been around only for the last, formally in the last 30 years, but we've known about the connection for much longer, for more than a century.

Even back in the 1890s, a lot of us in high school, we learned about Ivan Pavlov and his experiment with conditioning, classical conditioning, where he would, apparently it was a bell, he would ring a bell, and he would associate that with bringing food in for his dogs.

And eventually, just the sound of ringing the bell would cause the dogs to believe that food was on its way, and he observed that they started to salivate.

And then it came to be that like, you know, he could just ring the bell even without bringing food in and they would salivate.

And that was the conditioning.

But if you think about this from a neurogastroenterological perspective, which is how I think about it, the even more interesting finding there is that the first phase of digestion doesn't start when you chew food.

It doesn't start when it hits the stomach.