Turns out the bathroom is a terrible place to doomscroll. In a small PLOS One study from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, adults who reported using smartphones on the toilet had a 46 percent higher likelihood of hemorrhoids, even after accounting for age, sex, BMI, exercise, straining, and fiber intake.
The numbers are blunt. Of 125 colonoscopy patients surveyed, 66 percent used a phone on the toilet, and 43 percent had hemorrhoids visualized on scope. Time is the tell: 37 percent of phone users lingered more than five minutes per visit, compared with just 7.1 percent of non-users. Reading news topped the on-toilet activities, followed by social media. No surprise there, but the study’s twist is that straining was not associated with increased risk in this sample. The real suspect is time on the seat.
“Using a smartphone while on the toilet was linked to a 46 percent increased chance of having hemorrhoids.”
That is the senior author, gastroenterologist Trisha Pasricha, spelling out the headline result. It aligns with old bathroom folklore from the newspaper era, but now with a modern interface and a dopamine-friendly feed. And because the participants were already in a clinical setting, endoscopists directly evaluated hemorrhoids, lending more weight than a typical self-report survey.
Still, this is not causation. It is a cross-sectional snapshot of habits and findings in a relatively small group, mostly age 45 and older, who were scheduled for screening colonoscopy. The researchers did try to tighten the bolts: two independent endoscopists reviewed a subset of images, landing on substantial agreement (Cohen’s kappa 0.62). That strengthens confidence in the outcome measure, even if it does not settle the “why.”
What the “why” likely comes down to is pressure and time. A standard toilet seat offers little support to the pelvic floor, so minutes can matter. Phones keep us in place. If you want a buried lede, here it is: only 35 percent of users acknowledged that their phone actually made them sit longer at least once or twice per week. In other words, people may not realize that toilet time has quietly stretched into toilet time.
The study also found that phone-on-toilet users reported less weekly exercise than non-users. That fits a broader pattern in the literature linking heavier device engagement with lower physical activity. It is not proof that scrolling in the bathroom creates a sedentary life, but it does hint at a cluster of behaviors that travel together. Modern life is optimized for attention, not necessarily for circulation.
Clinically, the advice is almost quaint: leave the phone outside, aim to finish in a few minutes, and if you cannot, pause and ask why. Are you genuinely having trouble, or did a headline and a comment thread hijack your morning? The public-health stakes are not trivial. Hemorrhoids drive nearly four million U.S. clinic and ER visits each year and more than $800 million in costs. A simple behavioral tweak, even if it saves ten minutes a day, scales in a population.
“This study bolsters advice to people in general to leave the smartphones outside the bathroom and to try to spend no more than a few minutes to have a bowel movement.”
Reasonable, and mercifully cheap. There is room to go further. Timers, app limits, even a designated bathroom shelf for your phone outside the door. And yes, future studies should track people over time and test whether nudges reduce on-toilet minutes and, in turn, hemorrhoid incidence. For now, the safest bet is also the simplest: when nature calls, do not put it on hold for a feed refresh.
One last thought, more personal than prescriptive. If popular apps are designed to make minutes vanish, the bathroom may simply be a bad bargaining space. The price of an extra scroll is pressure you do not feel until you do.
Sitting on a standard toilet places direct pressure on the hemorrhoidal cushions in the anal canal. Unlike a chair, there is minimal support for the pelvic floor, so tissues bear more load. If you linger, blood can pool and the cushions can become engorged, which may contribute to hemorrhoid formation or flare. Smartphones are excellent at stretching a quick visit into a longer one, often without users noticing. In this study, more than a third of phone users spent over five minutes per visit, compared to under one in ten non-users. The study did not prove causation or rule out every confounder, but it suggests a practical takeaway: keep toilet sessions brief, aim for a soft daily stool with fiber and fluids, and consider leaving the phone outside to avoid unplanned extra minutes.
Journal: PLOS One
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0329983
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