Survey Shows Americans Spend 4.5 Days Per Year Scrolling Social Media On The Toilet
It's bad for your brain, bad for your body and probably bad for your plumbing in some way no one's thought of yet too.
Zhuravlev Andrey | Shutterstock Move over baseball, doomscrolling has become America's favorite pastime — unofficially, anyway. All of us have fallen prey to it a time or two, if not several times a day, idly scrolling our phones and then suddenly we look up and two hours have gone by. But it turns out that not only are we doing way too much of this, we're doing it in a kind of gross way in a kind of gross place.
Americans spend 4.5 days a year doomscrolling social media on the toilet, according to a survey.
Nope, it's not just you for whom the commode has become a dedicated TikTok viewing space. That's according to a survey done by QS Supplies, a U.K. provider of bathroom design materials. They polled 1,000 people in the U.K. and the U.S. about their scrolling habits on a hunch that a lot of us are combining doom with nature's call, and it turns out, they were right.
They found that on average, Americans spend a total of 4.5 days sitting on the john, scrolling the news and social media, especially Instagram and TikTok. That's 6,480 minutes. Doctors say a bowel movement should take about five minutes. If you go once a day, that's 1,825 minutes a year. What on Earth are y'all doing for an additional FIVE THOUSAND MINUTES in there?!
According to the survey, most of you are sitting there hovering over the bowl, wrapping up whatever it was you were watching while you were going. Sixty-one percent of respondents said they regularly hog the bathroom long after they're done doing their business to wrap up their important Instagram-scrolling business. For Gen Z, it's even higher: 72%
But perhaps most bracing is this: 20% of you absolute weirdos have taken a work call OR ATTENDED A MEETING while relieving yourselves. Twenty percent! Sitting there on Zoom talking about KPIs while going number two?! All of you are fired!
This isn't just weird, it's also unsanitary, and virtually nobody is keeping on top of it.
Now we've all heard since we were children that your hands are absolutely filthy after you go to the bathroom, right? So do the math, here. Unless you're being meticulous about making sure you don't touch your phone at all between the wiping and the handwashing, your phone is… um, well, disgusting.
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But it doesn't stop there. We've also all seen those animations about how flushing the toilet basically sends a jet cloud of minuscule fecal particles blowing through your bathroom like nuclear fallout, right? So unless you're in the minority of people who put the lid down first… well, that phone of yours is covered in a patina of nastiness.
All of which is to say: Only 1 in 4 respondents to the survey said it ever occurs to them to clean their phone after taking it into the bathroom with them, and most of those people are liars because who is out here sanitizing their phone EVER, let alone the several times a day they take it into the john. They had to have public health officials tell us to clean our phones during a pandemic, for God's sake! Anyway, brb I have to go hurl my phone into a bucket of whatever they sanitize operating rooms with.
Toilet doomscrolling is also bad for your body.
We all know that doomscrolling is bad for your brain. Upsetting headlines, let alone visuals, trigger your brain's fight or flight response, flooding you with cortisol, and unless you are regularly exercising or doing breathing, meditation, or somatic practices, your body isn't effectively discharging all that energy. So you STAY in fight or flight, which only makes you more anxious. And that's your PSA to tell you to put your dang phone down and stop staring into the abyss.
All that stress and cortisol damages your body, too, but if you're doing it on the toilet, that physical impact is magnified. Because doctors say that sitting on the toilet longer than you need to puts undue gravitational pull on your, uh, nether regions, and makes them ripe for something nobody wants or needs: hemorrhoids.
Many gastroenterologists and colorectal surgeons suggest never sitting on the toilet for longer than five minutes if you can help it, for precisely this reason. And they recommend leaving your phone in the other room to avoid the temptation.
So, there you have it. Toilet doomscrolling is making you gross, crazy, and hemorrhoid-riddled. We must stop this madness! The can used to be the place where we all did our best thinking, which, come to think of it, is probably part of what's creating all the stupidity we're doomscrolling in the first place! Leave the phone out of the bathroom, and you just might change the world, one BM at a time.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
