By: Walter Miller
A 2025 study linked scrolling on the toilet to a higher risk of hemorrhoids. The bigger story may be that we have run out of places where a screen is not welcome, a point a new humor book makes with rhymes.
Step into any public restroom at an airport, office, or ballpark and listen. Behind the stall doors you will hear the soft chime of a notification, the swish of a thumb, the tinny start of a video someone forgot to mute. Nobody is in a hurry. The line at the sinks is growing, and a dozen people are catching up on the news.
We have quietly turned the restroom into a lounge. A recent medical study suggests that may not be good for us, and even those who roll their eyes at the science might agree the manners deserve a look too.
What The Study Found
In September 2025, researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston published a study in the journal PLOS One on smartphone use in the bathroom. The first author was Chethan Ramprasad, and the senior author was Dr. Trisha Pasricha.
The team surveyed 125 adults who were scheduled for routine screening colonoscopies about their lifestyle and toilet habits. Doctors then checked each patient for hemorrhoids during the procedure. The results were striking:
- About two-thirds of participants, roughly 66 percent, said they used a smartphone on the toilet. Phone users tended to be younger.
- After adjusting for age, exercise and fiber intake, phone users had a 46 percent higher risk of hemorrhoids.
- About 37 percent of phone users said they sat for more than five minutes per visit, compared with about 7 percent of people who left the phone behind.
- The most common phone activities were reading the news and browsing social media.
One more detail stands out. The researchers found no link between straining and hemorrhoids in this group. They suspect the culprit is not effort but lingering, since a longer sit may put prolonged pressure on delicate tissue.
Care is warranted here. This was a small study; it relied on self-reported habits, and it shows an association, not proof that phones cause hemorrhoids. The authors themselves call for more research. Nothing in it says your phone is dangerous. What it says is that the people who bring phones to the toilet tend to stay longer, and staying longer appears to carry a cost. Anyone with symptoms should see a physician rather than rely on a news article.
The Etiquette Problem Nobody Mentions
The medical question is for the researchers. The social question is for everyone else.
A restroom is a shared space with a simple unwritten contract: do what you came to do, leave it clean, and let the next person have a turn. A phone breaks that contract in a quiet way. It converts a two-minute errand into a ten-minute break and sends the people waiting outside to hover, shift their weight, and glance at their watches.
That is a theme in The Legend of Confuse-us: Timeless Bathroom Wisdom from the Ancient Scholar, a hardcover humor book by Laurence Grant published in September 2025. Grant builds his book around an invented ancient philosopher, a fictional contemporary of Confucius, who dispenses bathroom advice in verse. The sage had little patience for stall-sitters:
When using bathroom, time well spent You not paying six-month rent Remember, there’s waiting a lady or gent.
He had a point, and he was not even dealing with an infinite scroll.
A related concern is hygiene, though there are no numbers to cite here. The phone that rests on the bathroom counter or a knee is the same phone later set beside a dinner plate or handed to a child. Even a careful hand-washer does not usually give the phone a turn at the sink. How much that matters is a personal call, but it is worth a moment’s thought.
Why We Do It
There is no mystery about why the phone follows us in. Boredom feels intolerable now, and the bathroom is one of the few places where a person is guaranteed a few idle minutes. For previous generations, the filler was a magazine or the back of the shampoo bottle. Today the filler is a bottomless feed designed by very smart people to be hard to put down.
A magazine ends. A feed does not. That is the quiet difference between the old habit and the new one, and it may be why the study found that phone users sat so much longer. Nothing in the device says “that’s enough.”
There is an irony worth admitting. Grant’s book is designed, in part, to be read in the bathroom, and one chapter of it is devoted to what he calls “techno-ditties” for the computer-minded. But a book of short verse can be finished in a sitting, and then the reader stands up. His rhymes on the subject are blunt about it:
To help you curb your bathroom vices, limit your time on your devices.
The Last Room Without A Screen
There is a larger reason to care, and it has nothing to do with medicine. For most of human history, a few minutes alone and unoccupied was an ordinary part of the day. People stared out windows. They waited for buses. They sat and thought. Over the last fifteen years we have steadily eliminated all of it, one screen at a time. The car, the kitchen table, the bed, the waiting room and the elevator have all fallen. The bathroom was the last holdout, and now it has fallen as well.
Confuse-us, the book’s imaginary sage, saw this coming in his own way. Among his teachings is this one:
Those who suffer from constipation have plenty of time for contemplation.
It is a joke, of course. It is also a small argument for solitude, for the occasional minute when nobody is asking for your attention and you are not asking anyone else for theirs. Ideas tend to arrive in those minutes. So does calm. When we fill every gap with content, we lose the gap.
A Modest Proposal
Nobody is proposing a ban or a lecture. A house rule that most of us can live with will do.
Leave the phone outside. Put it in a pocket, on the hallway table or in a bag. Half the battle is simply keeping it out of reach.
If it must come in, set a limit. The study measured visits of more than five minutes. If you find yourself sitting past that mark and the reason is on the screen, take it as a sign to stand up.
Respect the line. In a public restroom, especially one with a queue, the scroll can wait. Another person is standing there, perhaps with a train to catch.
Make one room a refuge. Hosts might try it. A small sign, a basket for phones outside the powder room door, a magazine that does not buzz. It will be noticed and appreciated.
Ask your doctor about symptoms. If the discomfort the study describes sounds familiar, you do not need the internet. You need a physician.
None of this is hard. It is only unfamiliar. A generation ago, nobody needed to be told to leave the television in the living room.
The bathroom has always been a place for a short, private pause. Giving it back to ourselves costs nothing. We might even find that five quiet minutes, without a feed, are the best part of the day.
Priya Nair is [bio]. The Legend of Confuse-us: Timeless Bathroom Wisdom from the Ancient Scholar, by Laurence Grant, is available on Amazon. More at confuse-us.com.
Source: Ramprasad C, Pasricha T, et al., Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, PLOS One 2025;20(9):e0329983.
