Addiction
"I just have no self-control" is the thing people say directly before describing a system built, by very well-paid people, to make self-control as difficult as it is possible to make it. That's not an excuse. It's simply an accurate description of the odds.
Dopamine is not the chemical of pleasure, whatever the popular shorthand claims. It's the chemical of anticipation. It fires in the gap before a reward, not during it, which is precisely why pull-to-refresh feeds behave like slot machines. The uncertainty is the mechanism. You don't know if there's something new. That not-knowing is what keeps the thumb moving.
The bathroom is an unusually effective place for this loop to run without interruption. No one is watching. Nothing else is competing for attention. There is a built-in block of unstructured time that used to belong to boredom, and boredom, as it turns out, was doing more work than it gets credit for — it's when idea-wandering and basic digestion cues get their moment. A phone in that gap doesn't just add a distraction. It removes the one part of the day that had nothing scheduled into it.
This is also why bathroom scrolling is harder to self-regulate than, say, not checking your phone at dinner. At dinner there's social pressure. In the bathroom there is nothing external stopping the loop except your own resolve, and resolve is precisely the resource these systems are best at bypassing.
None of this is a reason to feel bad. It's a reason to stop fighting it with willpower, which was never going to outcompete a system engineered by people who do this professionally. The actual fix is environmental — a physical barrier between you and the phone at the exact moment the loop would ordinarily begin.
And that's why I urge you, for the sake of the human race and whatever's left of your attention span, to consider any product that puts a wall between you and the loop before it starts. We happen to make one — drop it. It isn't a discipline tool. It's a way of never needing discipline to begin with.