Reason Number 1: It's gross. 

Using your phone while on the toilet has become the norm for most people. In the age of rampant Internet addition, bathroom breaks have become the most convinient time to catch up on the latest celebrity gossip or stalk your ex's Facebook. Hell, there’s a good chance you’re reading this article from the toilet right now. 

Though using your phone on the loo is a great time-dump, it's a disgusting and vile habit that may screw up your body's function and overall health. Straight up, phone use in the bathroom is disgusting. 

Using your phone, which is obviously going to be held against your face at some point, in a room where people are pooping creates a variety of problems. 

First, it's been shown that using your phone on the toilet can screw up your body's response to toilet time. You see, you really shouldn't be sitting on the toilet for more than 10-minutes or so. Those 30-minute Reddit/poo binges aren't doing you any favors. Sitting on a toilet for longer than 10-minutes can screw with the body's pooping process. Your body gets confused on what it's supposed to be doing, which can cause actual medical problems down the road.  

This can also cause constipation, as your body grows accustomed to working with a very long and unnatural timeframe in the bathroom. Additionally, your casual 30-minute bathroom sessions can lead to hemorrhoids. Hemorrhoids are basically inflamed veins near your butt-hole that can bleed and will be super itchy and painful. Eww. Is it worth it to develop up hemorrhoids because you can't stop Tindering from the toilet? Nope, definitely not.

Additional problems happen with your pelvic muscles from sitting on the toilet too long, which can make the act of pooping far more difficult than it should be. If you don't want to develop the pooping problems of a 95-year-old man you should probably stay off you're phone.

A lot of experts believe that standard toilets in general are poorly designed for healthy body function. A lot of research suggest that humans should poop in a more squatted position than a traditional toilet allows. This allows for maximum efficiency and is less hard on your body. Good luck online shopping from you phone while you're squatted over a hole in the ground. Now there's even a squat-toilet adorably called the Squatty Potty, that promises to be a more natural way to take a dump. Their promo video with a Unicorn shitting rainbows really sold us on the idea. 

Second, is the obvious issue that using your phone in a bathroom is absolutely fucking disgusting. Way back in 2012, a study showed that 75 percent of Americans admit to using their phone in the bathroom. That's the number of people that admitted to using their phone on the shitter. When you take into account all the people that were too bashful to admit to the disgusting act, you'd probably close to an even 100 percent of people using their phone in the bathroom. 

This is problematic. Restrooms — and especially public restrooms — are abhorrent cesspools of poopy air. Things like E. Coli, Salmonella, Norovirus, MRSA and Hepatitis A can all be found in public restrooms. Of course these pathogens can find their way onto your phone. Have you ever actually cleaned your phone? Like with disinfectant? No, you haven't and we certainly haven't either. This makes everyone that uses their phone's in the bathroom susceptible to some pretty serious illnesses.  

Furthermore, flushing a toilet sets off a poop-particle explosion that sends a cloud of bacteria into the air of the bathroom. This fecal explosion from a flushed toilet is one of the many reasons people say you should not keep your toothbrush out in the open in your bathroom, because it might get covered in airborne poop particles. Yum. 

So there's shit floating around in the air of bathrooms. Literally. Like, actual poop particles are swirling around the air. You know what happens to those poo-particles? They end up on your phone, which you then will hold up to your face as you argue with a Comcast representatives for 60-minutes about how you were double-billed last month. Don't make that conversation even worse by unwittingly poisoning yourself from the gross bacteria that landed on your phone while you played Candy Crush in the public restroom. 

Even if using your phone in the bathroom doesn't ruin your bowels or lead to you contracting some gross stomach virus, you might just drop your phone in the toilet like an idiot. According to one study, 19 percent of people have dropped their phone in the toilet at some point. No one wants that. 

So yeah, just stop using your phone in the bathroom. It's making pooping harder for yourself, may cause you to contract some crazy stomach virus and it's really really gross. We're only here to help.

[originally published October 28, 2016]