Welcome to the Mind Buddy Green podcast. I'm Jason Wachib, founder and co-CEO of MindBuddy Green, and your host.

What if the quote-unquote normal things you're doing in the bathroom are actually working against you?

Dr. Tricia Peswicha is a gastroontologist at Beth Israel, a Washington Post health columnist, and the author of

the new book, You've Been Pooping All Wrong. In today's show, Trisha explains her lab's findings

that bringing your phone to the bathroom, raises your wrists of hemorrhoids by 46%. We dig into why.

Pooping anywhere from three times a day to once every three days is normal and the $30

bidet she recommends to almost every patient and we even get into traveling and what happens

there when it comes to bowel movements. Let's dive in. Let's start with frequency.

Frequency might not be the right metric.

So can we talk about that?

Yeah, I think whenever somebody is like, are my bowel movements normal?

They think I'm going to tell them, well, if you go one today, then yeah, of course you're normal.

That's almost never what I tell anyone. And I don't think frequency is the number one thing, for lack of better word, that we should be so worried about. For me, what makes a healthy, comfortable bowel movement is one,

it should be comfortable. That comfort is the most important metric to me. I want it to be effortless. I don't want you to be

straining your eyeballs out. And then two, I want it to be something that doesn't interfere with your

social calendar. You know, like you can go once a day. But, and this is something I hear in my clinic

all the time. It'll be like somebody has come in having been dragged in by their partner. and they'll be like, you know, yeah, he goes once a day, I suppose, or she goes once a day, but I'm waiting 45 minutes to get out the door, you know, because they're in the bathroom. They're hogging the bathroom. And if it's like that, I don't think that's healthy, right? Like, you shouldn't be spending more than five minutes in there

at a time. But it's often that you don't really know how many times you go per day, you know,

is considered normal until you like pair up with somebody later in your life or you go to

college. So I think we spend most of our young adult adolescent life not really knowing

what other people are doing.

Like, we barely discuss our habits with our parents or our siblings, like much less like

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