What 82 Americans do on their phones while they poop
Last week, I asked 190 Americans (18+) about their most recent trip to the bathroom.
I found that forty-three percent brought and used their phone.
What were they doing?
Social media, mostly. But also texting, shopping, reading the news, and playing games.
There's something almost poetic about that.
The bathroom is one of the last places we go to be alone — and we've packed it with the exact same noise we were trying to get away from.
So why do we bring our phones in there?
Most people I surveyed were going #2, which fits the magazine-rack theory: if you’re sitting there for a while, you reach for something.
But I don’t think that theory holds up.
Among those who used their phone, 25% were just going #1 — many of them men.
There’s no real downtime there.
You could point to phone addiction.
But when I asked people if they’ve ever gone to the bathroom to sit and be on their phone, 25% said yes — and only 2% said they do it routinely.
That 2% probably isn't hiding a bigger number.
When people are ashamed of a behavior, they underreport it. Heavy drinking. Gambling. Smartphone use carries little stigma. "I'm addicted to my phone" is practically a meme. If anything, the surprising number is the 25% who said yes. That's surely an undercount.
"Ever" is a low bar — that time you needed five minutes away from a loud dinner party? That counts.
So what’s going on?
I think the phone isn’t something we bring into the bathroom.
I think it’s something that we never put down, like a wedding ring, except one that rewards you for checking it.
The bathroom isn’t special.
It’s just another moment when the reflex fires.
Now, the reason I’m going on and on about what we do on the toilet isn’t because I have a grand theory about smartphone use.
I’m writing about toilets because the survey I used to collect this data took respondents an average of 1 minute and 6 seconds to complete. I got the data in about 30 minutes.
That’s it.
A few simple questions. A handful of charts. A story.
You don’t need a 40-question instrument and a $75,000 budget to uncover something interesting.
You just need to ask a few questions about something worth investigating — and then follow the results where they lead.
If that’s something you need help with, consider booking a Survey Roast.
Send me your survey draft, and for $145, I'll make a 15-minute Loom video with copy-and-paste edits and suggestions to improve your survey data quality.
Otherwise, I’ve provided links to free resources below, including one to each data visualization. (With a free account to DataWrapper, you can access editable versions.)
Resources
The data
Data visualization 1
Data visualization 2
Data visualization 3
Cheers,
Sam