What sitting there with your phone is actually doing to your body

The toilet was engineered, by whichever unsung committee handles these things, for roughly two minutes of use. That is how long the job takes. Everything past that is not digestion. It is simply you, sitting on a small ceramic plinth, doing something your body was not consulted on.

The seat is doing the damage. Sitting on it opens the anal canal in a way that standing or lying does not, and the longer you stay there, the more blood pools in the veins around it. Doctors have a word for the result, and it is not a pleasant one. Colorectal surgeons have been mentioning this for years, quietly, in the way professionals mention things they've clearly given up expecting anyone to act on. The timeline tracks suspiciously well with the smartphone. A generation that used to manage this in under a minute now averages nine.

There is also the small matter of straining. A phone is a distraction, and distraction changes what your body does without asking permission — people scrolling tend to strain more and relax less, which is the opposite of helpful. You end up working against your own plumbing while thinking about someone else's kitchen renovation. Nobody wins.

There's a postural cost too, if you're taking notes. Hunching over a screen on a low seat is not a position your spine agreed to hold for ten minutes, and if you've ever stood up afterward feeling like a question mark, that was not your imagination.

None of this is a personal failing. It's a design mismatch — furniture built for two minutes, used for ten, because the most interesting object you own happens to be within arm's reach. Willpower does not fix this. Willpower loses to a notification every time, without exception, and always will. Distance fixes it. Put the phone somewhere you cannot reach without standing up, and your body will conclude its business in roughly the time it was always going to take.

And that's why I urge you, for the sake of the human race and your own rectal veins, to consider any product on the market that puts a bit of distance between you and your mobile master. We happen to make one. It's a wooden box. It goes outside the door. That's the whole pitch — drop it.