Dr. Trisha Pasricha

People should not spend more than five minutes at a time in the bathroom.

Yep.

Yeah.

And this is really hard because we're all in there with our smartphones, right?

And the reason this is important, last year I did this study in my lab where we looked at people coming in for their screening colonoscopies.

And so we're taking a look directly with our eyes, with our scope to see what's going on in their bodies.

And we asked them right before they went in all about themselves.

How long do you spend in the bathroom?

Do you take your smartphone in the bathroom with you?

How much fiber do you eat?

How much do you exercise?

What we found is that people who take their smartphones into the toilet with them, they are more than five times as likely to spend more than five minutes at a time in the bathroom.

And they are at a 46% increased risk of having hemorrhoids.

We saw them with our eyes.

Yeah.

And, you know, what we think is happening is that, I mean, we get distracted with our smartphones when we're trying to go to sleep, when we're waiting in the line, something like, why would we not be getting distracted beyond belief in the bathroom when we bring our smartphones in?

And what that's doing is making us sit for longer than we intended on this seat that has an open bowl.

So there is no pelvic floor support.

And our hemorrhoids are actually just engorged veins.

That's all they are.