Doctors can tell if you scroll on the toilet. Here’s how.

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If you bring your phone with you to the bathroom, you’re very normal. You’re also at risk of developing hemorrhoids—swollen veins in the anus and lower rectum that can cause pain and bleeding—according to a study that came out last week. Of the 125 adult participants in the study, two-thirds reported smartphone use during bathroom visits. Subsequent colonoscopies revealed that those bathroomgoers had a 46 percent higher risk of hemorrhoids than those who didn’t use their phones. It’s not the phone itself causing problems, of course, but the fact that it often prolongs a visit to the toilet.

This probably isn’t news to you. The purported health risks of extended loo time have long circulated through doctors’ offices and news articles. “Don’t Sit on the Toilet for More Than 10 Minutes, Doctors Warn,” read a CNN headline in 2024. “Why You Shouldn’t Sit on the Toilet Longer Than 15 Minutes,” a Men’s Health article explained in 2016. Gastroenterologists have been advising a five-minute limit to their patients for as long as study co-author Trisha Pasricha can remember. “It’s what I heard when I was in training from the GI docs who were teaching me, and I kept saying it to my patients,” says Pasricha, a gastroenterologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “It’s kind of what most people say.”

The scientific literature on the issue, however, is scant—just a few studies, the largest of which relied on hemorrhoid self-reporting rather than evaluations, which makes the results less reliable. (“There’s all kinds of other things that we just don’t think about that can be a little lumpy and bumpy on our butts that are actually not hemorrhoids,” Pasricha explains.) That’s what led Pasricha’s team to conduct this new study—and why the results were something of a relief. After all these years, “it’s nice to finally have data to offer patients,” she says.

Given the finding, I can’t help but think: Man, do we all have hemorrhoids? Because people have been guilty of prolonged toilet sits since, well, there were toilets. “Roman baths contained libraries wherein one could pore over scrolls, and ‘The Life of St. Gregory’ (1296-1359) recommends the isolated retreat of the medieval fortress toilet … as a place for uninterrupted reading,” wrote Henry Alford in the New York Times in 2006. In the 1700s, Lord Chesterfield wrote about a “gentleman” friend who read the Latin poets “in the necessary-house,” Alford notes. In the early 1800s, before the invention of toilet paper, people relied on pages of their reading material—typically The Old Farmers’ Almanac, which, in 1919, started including holes in the corner so it could be hung in outhouses and bathrooms. In 1979, jokester Jack Kreismer saw the vision for a line of books marketed specifically for use in the bathroom, and his Bathroom Library series burgeoned into a whole line of bathroom-reading-specific products (some might recall Uncle John’s Bathroom Readers); of course, Reader’s Digest was another bathroom staple. When no form of entertainment was available, we turned to the text around us, pretending to be interested in, hey, what is in this tube of toothpaste. Now we have smartphones. At this point, we’ve all more or less looked hemorrhoids square in the eye and decided it was worthwhile. Right?

Not quite. While we don’t have long-term data on whether the length of people’s toilet trips has changed over the years, we do know that smartphones are addictive in a way that books, crosswords, and shampoo bottles simply aren’t. “Smartphones are so different from other reading material,” says Pasricha. “They are designed to maximize how much time you spend on them.” If you’re reading the funnies, you’ll eventually run out of funnies, and bathroom-reader books tend to be short by nature (which, at least for Kreismer, was never about keeping bathroom visits brief, but rather a happy coincidence of the genre). But TikTok and other social apps have no end. Part of the reason I use the phone on the toilet, I think, is to limit my phone usage time. If I lie on the couch to scroll for a few minutes, it could easily turn into an hour—but on the toilet, I won’t be caught lingering. Right? Except, inevitably, people do.

That happens to be perhaps the most important finding of the new study, Pasricha says. Not that smartphone users are more likely to get hemorrhoids, or even that smartphone users were five times more likely to spend more than five minutes on the toilet than nonusers. Rather: The fact that 65 percent of the smartphone users were not aware of how much longer they were spending on the toilet because of the phone. “Time is distorted when you’re staring at these screens,” says Pasricha. “If it’s highly engaging, you so quickly lose grasp of what you’re doing.”

Indeed, a recent survey showed that it’s the phone-savvy younger generations that are spending the longest on the toilet—and we really don’t know yet what effects that will have on the body. It might not just be hemorrhoids: Over the long term, smartphones could lead to changing the very dynamics of our pelvic floors, suggests Pasricha. It’s something her team is looking into, and she hopes others will as well.

As American novelist Henry Miller once wrote, delightfully, some text is elevated in the loo: “There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet—if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.” I would argue the same about certain TikToks. So don’t worry—you don’t have to give up the long tradition of bathroom reading. But consider how you might incorporate that five-minute limit. You might set a timer (can’t you just see a bathroom-timer feature in the next version of iPhone?), or try to keep yourself to a two-TikTok limit. Maybe dig out your old Reader’s Digests, or prepare a new bathroom library. And if you’re one of the 42 percent of Americans who go to the bathroom just to get some alone time? “You don’t necessarily have to, like, pull down your britches and then sit on this unsupported, open toilet bowl, if what you really want is just a moment of relaxation and zen,” says Pasricha. “Just put the lid down.”

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