People used to kill time on the toilet by reading magazines or reading every ingredient listed on a bottle of shampoo. Now, in this brave new world we live in, we have smartphones and tablets and handheld gaming devices that let us text, game, browse, read, and doomscroll, all while we poop.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Will always come up with a reason to sit on the toilet for way longer than we need to, and doing that might be hurting our butts.
According to new research presented at the 2025 Digestive Diseases Week conference in San Diego, all that toilet phone time might be giving us hemorrhoids.
Researchers surveyed 125 people who were about to get colonoscopies. They found that 93 percent of them admitted to using their phones on the toilet at least once a week. Nearly half were reading the news, 44 percent were on social media, and about 30 percent were emailing or texting.
The researchers found that people who used phones on the toilet were 46 percent more likely to have hemorrhoids than those who didn’t. It didn’t matter how old they were, how much fiber they ate, or whether they worked out. The common denominator is that they all became hypnotized by their phones while on the shitter.
There are a lot of funky variables at play in this study. The sample size isn’t impressive, and of course, correlation does not equal causation. Blah blah blah. You get it. But its findings can be tossed onto the pile of a growing body of evidence that is no longer simply suggesting but outright screaming that sitting on the toilet for too long puts pressure on the veins in your rectum, causing them to swell, which leads directly to hemorrhoids.
To mitigate the threat of toilet seat-induced hemorrhoids, experts say you should spend no more than 3 to 10 minutes on the toilet, all while abiding by a tried and true classic bit of folk wisdom: shit or get off the pot.
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