Your Phone Is Giving You Haemorrhoids. And You Already Know It.
Your phone doesn't create haemorrhoids. It creates delay — keeping you seated long after your body has finished. A 2025 Harvard study found smartphone users were about five times as likely to spend more than five minutes on the toilet and were 46% more likely to have haemorrhoids after researchers adjusted for age, sex, BMI, exercise, straining, and fibre intake. The fix is unglamorous: leave the phone outside, raise your knees above your hips, sort out your fibre.
⚠️ Rectal bleeding, black stools, or persistent pelvic pain need a doctor's assessment, not a Google search. Do not assume it is haemorrhoids. Get it checked.
- Your phone does not directly cause haemorrhoids. It keeps you sitting long enough for them to develop.
- Longer toilet time means sustained pressure on rectal veins that have no valves to push blood back up.
- Raising your knees above your hips reduces the anorectal kink and makes evacuation easier for most people.
- Fibre and fluid keep stool soft enough to pass without straining.
- Rectal bleeding is not always haemorrhoids. Always get it assessed by a doctor.
- 1.Do you spend more than five minutes on the toilet most visits?
- 2.Do you scroll on a screen while sitting?
- 3.Do you frequently strain or feel incomplete after a bowel movement?
- 4.Are your knees level with or below your hips when you sit?
The Toilet Was Already a Compromise. Then We Added the Phone.
The modern toilet was not designed around how the body empties the bowel. It was designed around sanitation, plumbing, and Victorian ideas about what looked clean, civilised, and proper. Sir John Harington built one of the earliest modern flush-toilet designs for Queen Elizabeth I in 1596. It took nearly three more centuries for the seated indoor toilet to become a household standard.
Victorian engineers spread it because it solved sewage and privacy problems — not because anyone checked whether it helped humans defecate more efficiently.
Nobody held a biomechanics trial before it became the global default.
The seated toilet introduced a posture compromise. Then smartphones gave us the perfect reason to sit in that compromise for fifteen minutes every morning without noticing we were doing it.
"The modern toilet changed the angle. The smartphone changed the duration."
What Haemorrhoids Actually Are
Haemorrhoids are not foreign growths. They are normal anal cushions — vascular tissue that helps with sealing and control. They only become a problem when they swell, bleed, clot, or slip out of position. That is when people notice pain, pressure, itching, bleeding, or that persistent feeling that something is not quite right.
Two types:
Develop inside the rectum. Usually painless — but show up as bright red blood on toilet paper or in the bowl, or as prolapsed tissue that protrudes through the anus.
Develop under the skin around the anus. Can become genuinely painful — especially if a clot forms inside, turning it into a hard, tender lump (a thrombosed haemorrhoid).
The same habits feed both problems: constipation, chronic straining, long toilet sessions, low fibre intake, ageing, pregnancy, and excess weight. The ASCRS 2024 clinical guidelines summarise a systematic review of 19 studies showing people with haemorrhoids were significantly more likely to have constipation — an odds ratio of 2.09. In plain terms: constipation and haemorrhoids travel together more often than not.
What Your Toilet Is Doing to Your Body
The 90-Degree Trap: How Toilet Posture Causes Chronic Straining
When you sit on a standard toilet, your hips are at roughly 90 degrees to your thighs. This feels natural because you have done it your entire life. Normal is not the same as functional. Your body has been tolerating this mismatch since childhood.
At 90 degrees, a muscle called the puborectalis — a sling of tissue that loops around your lower rectum — stays partially contracted. In daily life, that tight loop is your insurance policy against accidents. It creates a bend in the lower rectum, called the anorectal angle, that keeps you continent when you are upright and moving.
The problem is that sitting on a modern toilet does not release this loop. The colon stays partially kinked. So you push against your own plumbing every single visit.
Think of it like a garden hose with a partial kink. Water still gets through — but you need far more pressure. Release the kink and it flows on its own.
Sakakibara et al. (2010) measured anorectal angles across multiple positions and found squatting produced an angle of approximately 126 degrees, compared with around 100 degrees when seated. A wider angle means less kink, less resistance, and less of that "almost done but not quite" feeling that makes people reach for their phones.
Sikirov (2003) studied 28 healthy volunteers across three defecation positions. People felt they had to strain significantly less in a squatting position compared with seated — and it took less time.
The Venous Pooling Problem
When you sit on a toilet, your pelvic floor is completely unsupported. A chair holds your weight from below. A toilet seat leaves the base of your pelvis hanging in open air. Gravity does what gravity does — it pulls blood downward into the haemorrhoidal venous plexus, the network of blood vessels in your lower rectum and anal canal.
Those vessels lack the valves that other veins use to push blood back up. There is no mechanical barrier against sustained downward pressure. Your veins are expanding against a floor that is not there.
The 2025 PLOS One study used more than five minutes as its marker of prolonged toilet time. It found that 37.3% of smartphone users exceeded that mark compared with just 7.1% of non-users. This is not a proven biological cliff at exactly minute five. It is a sign that phone users were simply camping there far longer — and the longer-sitting group had meaningfully more haemorrhoids.
When you repeat this every morning, the cushions stay swollen. Over months and years, they can enlarge and begin to prolapse.
"The body does not know you are reading emails. It only knows you are still sitting."
Why You Brought the Phone in the First Place
You are not bringing your phone to the toilet because you are disorganised or careless. You are exhausted. The bathroom is the only room with a lock where nobody can demand a piece of your time.
Here is the truth: for many adults over 30, toilet scrolling is not entertainment. It is escape. When was the last time you had three uninterrupted minutes where nobody needed anything from you?
Michael Easter, in The Comfort Crisis (Rodale Books, 2021), argues that modern life has stripped away the boredom and discomfort that allow the brain to recover and process at rest. A Nielsen (2018) report estimated that US adults were spending over 11 hours per day interacting with media. The bathroom was the last holdout. Then it was not.
Linda Stone coined the term continuous partial attention to describe the always-on, never-quite-present attentional state that digital life creates. Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism (Portfolio/Penguin, 2019) proposes deliberate, value-based technology use as the antidote.
"This is not stupidity. It is escape. And your anatomy is paying the rent."
The Research: What the 2025 Harvard Study Actually Found
Researchers from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, affiliated with Harvard Medical School, published a cross-sectional study in PLOS One on 3 September 2025.
They tracked 125 adults scheduled for routine colonoscopies, surveyed them on smartphone habits in the bathroom, straining patterns, fibre intake, exercise, and bowel habits. Two endoscopists who did not know the participants' phone habits confirmed whether haemorrhoids were present.
This was a cross-sectional study of 125 people — it shows association, not direct causation. It does not prove that five minutes is a biological danger point. What it shows is a specific daily behaviour strongly linked to longer toilet time and higher haemorrhoid prevalence. That is worth acting on.
→ Read the full PLOS One study (DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0329983)
The Squatting Lesson: Useful, But Not Magic
Victorian industrialisation gave us the seated toilet. Nobody checked the biomechanics. The entire shift was an accident of modern convenience, not an optimisation of human biology.
Traditional squat-style toilets remain common across parts of South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and rural Africa. Observational data from populations that use them tends to show lower haemorrhoid prevalence. Interesting? Yes. Decisive? No. Diet, obesity, pregnancy patterns, age, healthcare access, diagnosis rates, and cultural reporting of sensitive conditions all differ between populations. Cross-cultural comparisons are messy.
The stronger case for squatting is biomechanical, not epidemiological.
"We made toilets more comfortable, then confused comfort with function."
What Changes When Your Knees Rise Above Your Hips
When your knees rise above your hips — even partially, as with a footstool — three useful things happen at once: the puborectalis sling relaxes, the lower rectum straightens, and toilet time drops with it.
| Factor | 90° Sitting | Knees-Above-Hips |
|---|---|---|
| Puborectalis muscle | Contracted — kinks rectum | Relaxes — straightens canal |
| Anorectal angle | ~100° (partial kink) | ~126° (straighter path) |
| Evacuation effort | Straining often needed | Gravity assists |
| Typical toilet time | 5–15 minutes | 1–3 minutes |
| Venous pressure exposure | Sustained | Reduced |
Source: Sakakibara et al., 2010; Sikirov, 2003
Modi et al. (2019) found a toilet footstool improved self-reported bowel movement ease in healthy volunteers. However, Trieu et al. (2023) found footstools did not help patients with constipation from mixed or unclear causes. A footstool is a mechanical correction — not a cure for complex constipation or pelvic floor disorders.
"The goal is not to squat perfectly. The goal is to stop fighting your own anatomy."
The Barefoot Protocol Fix
You do not need a complicated protocol. Three boring rules, applied together, fix the three things going wrong: time, angle, and stool quality.
Leave the Phone — The Attention Resistance Rule
Put the phone in another room before you go into the bathroom. Not on the cistern. Not on the floor beside you. In a different room.
Stop relying on willpower. Change the environment before you sit down. Remove the option and the habit changes faster than you expect.
The discomfort you feel in the first two or three days is real. That is your brain registering the absence of its usual hit of stimulation. The bathroom is, ironically, the ideal place to rebuild boredom tolerance — three quiet minutes, once or twice a day.
Call it Attention Resistance: a deliberate refusal to hand your last genuine pocket of quiet over to an algorithm. Not punishment. Reclamation.
Yes, the first few days feel strange. That is the point.
"A bowel movement should not need entertainment."
Change the Angle — The Knees-Above-Hips Rule
Before you buy anything — grab two thick books from your shelf. Stack them under your feet. Lean forward slightly with your elbows resting on your knees and your belly relaxed. Feel that easing of pressure? That is your anatomy working with you for once.
If it makes a difference, buy a footstool. A standard 15–20 cm stool achieves the knee-above-hip position for most adults — the goal matters more than the exact height: knees above hips, comfortably. The Squatty Potty is the most recognised product; any firm step with a non-slip surface does the same job.
- You have had recent pelvic surgery
- You have severe rectal prolapse
- You have significant hip or knee limitations
- You have complex, long-standing constipation that has not responded to standard changes
"The footstool isn't a hack. It's a correction — realigning your body with its own design."
Fix the Fuel — The 60-Second Coaching Standard
If you are sitting on the toilet for fifteen minutes, your digestion is leaving clues. Healthy bowel movements should be fast, effortless, and complete. That is not aspirational — it is the biological default when fibre and hydration are adequate.
This is a coaching standard, not a diagnostic rule. But it is achievable for most adults.
Absorbs water and forms a gel that keeps stool soft and passable.
Oats · Lentils · Apples · Chia seeds · Psyllium husk
Target: ~8–10g per day
Adds bulk and drives colonic transit.
Vegetables · Whole grains · Wheat bran · Nuts
Target: ~20–25g per day
Total daily target: 25–30g, built up gradually over two to three weeks. Dump 30g into your system tomorrow and your gut will protest. Build to it slowly and you will barely notice.
A Cochrane review of seven randomised trials (n = 378), cited in the ASCRS 2024 guidelines, found fibre reduced persistent haemorrhoid symptoms by 53% and significantly reduced bleeding.
Hydration: Fibre without enough fluid can turn from broom into cement. A practical starting point is around 30 ml per kilogram of bodyweight per day. Adjust for heat, exercise, and body size — use it as a baseline, not a religion.
"If your bowel movements take longer than a social media video, your diet is leaving clues."
The 7-Day Attention Resistance Challenge
Do not turn this into a productivity project. Just do the boring thing consistently for seven days.
| Day | The Physical Task | The Mental Task |
|---|---|---|
| 1–2 | Place a footstool beside the toilet. Knees above hips, every visit. | Leave the phone in another room. Two-to-three-minute rule: if nothing happens, stand up and go. |
| 3–4 | Relax the jaw and breathe slowly from the belly. Pelvic floor tension mirrors jaw tension. | Sit without a screen. Notice the discomfort. Notice it without obeying it. |
| 5–6 | Target total bathroom duration under three minutes. | Let your mind drift. This is the unfocused state your brain actually needs. |
| 7 | Compare how things feel versus Day 1 — speed, ease, completeness. | Notice whether the urge to bring the phone has reduced. Most people find it has. |
The Coach's Perspective
I have been using squat-style toilets whenever I travel to regions where they are still common, and the difference in completeness is noticeable. I feel genuinely empty afterwards in a way that does not always happen on a Western toilet unless I lean forward and elevate my feet. That small adjustment changed my own routine years ago.
One client I worked with — a working professional in his 50s — came to me with slow, effortful bowel movements that were taking too much of his morning. We looked at everything: fibre, hydration, movement. The clearest difference came from a combination of adding deep squats to his training, consciously leaning forward on the toilet, elevating his feet, and eventually picking up a Squatty Potty. His time in the bathroom dropped noticeably and he described the experience as more complete. His words were simple: "I don't feel stuck there anymore."
I want to be careful about what I claim here. I do not say toilet posture alone fixes your core or resolves hip issues. What I do believe, having seen it with multiple clients, is that chronic daily straining is part of the daily stress your body has to absorb. When you clean it up, the body responds.
— Shiva Malhotra, Barefoot Protocol
What Happens If You Don't Change
Haemorrhoids exist on a spectrum. Early-stage haemorrhoids often improve with the lifestyle changes above. If the habits stay the same, they can progress.
Grade 3 and 4 internal haemorrhoids prolapse and cannot be manually reduced. At that point, clinical intervention is needed. Rubber band ligation cuts off blood supply to the haemorrhoidal tissue. Haemorrhoidectomy is surgical removal. Both are effective. Many people would rather fix the daily habits early than end up needing either.
The phone-on-toilet pattern stacks two additional problems:
Tech neck from prolonged forward-head posture is cumulative. Forward-head position increases mechanical load on the cervical spine — and daily toilet scrolling adds ten to twenty extra minutes of that load to a day that already involves considerable screen time.
Pelvic floor strain from chronic daily straining does not get talked about enough. The pelvic floor is load-bearing tissue. Repeated daily pushing is part of the daily stress your body has to absorb. It is worth cleaning up before it compounds.
When to See a Doctor
I am a personal trainer, not a doctor. If you see blood, get it checked. Do not guess.
- Blood in your stool, on the toilet paper, or in the toilet bowl
- Black or very dark stools
- Persistent pain or pressure in the rectal area
- Unexplained weight loss
- A significant change in your normal bowel habits
- Prolapsed tissue that cannot be manually reduced
- Symptoms lasting more than one week despite lifestyle changes
- You are over 50 and have not had a recent bowel cancer screening
ASCRS 2024 guidelines are explicit: rectal bleeding should not automatically be attributed to haemorrhoids. A doctor needs to examine you properly.
What This Article Is Not Saying
- Not saying your phone directly causes haemorrhoids
- Not saying squatting cures haemorrhoids
- Not saying a footstool works for everyone
- Not saying rectal bleeding is probably fine
- Not saying these rules replace a doctor's assessment
Frequently Asked Questions
Does using your phone on the toilet cause haemorrhoids?
How long should you sit on the toilet?
Does a toilet footstool actually help?
Is squatting better than sitting for bowel movements?
What foods help prevent haemorrhoids?
What is the best toilet posture?
How do I break the phone-bathroom habit?
When should I see a doctor?
Glossary
This article is for educational purposes only. It is not a diagnosis and does not replace individual assessment by a qualified health professional. Rectal bleeding, black stools, persistent pelvic pain, unexplained weight loss, or significant changes in bowel habits can indicate serious conditions including inflammatory bowel disease and colorectal cancer. Always consult your doctor for proper evaluation. If you have had recent pelvic surgery, severe rectal prolapse, significant hip or knee limitations, or complex constipation that has not responded to standard measures, seek medical advice before using a toilet footstool.
Shiva helps adults over 30 rebuild the simple daily habits modern life strips away: walking, squatting, lifting, sleeping, eating real food, and paying attention. He coaches clients online, worldwide.