On Pooping in the Dark?No Lights, No Phones, No Distractions

At the nearest rest stop, I dashed into a bathroom so single-mindedly I didn’t turn on the lights and collapsed onto the toilet. Though I haven’t yet been able to recreate every condition, to this day I try to dump in total darkness: no lights, no phone, the gulf between mind and body quaked shut.The (c)rapture I felt was likely a case of “poophoria,” explains Anish Sheth, the gastroenterologist and coauthor of toilet-side staple What’s Your Poo Telling You? The exact science is unknown, but Sheth thinks the sensation may result from “a slightly prolonged buildup, an overdistension of the rectum, and immediate collapse by passing a sizable stool, which fires the vagus nerve and releases endorphins.” Lights-out pooping, Sheth adds, may “help with a proper rate of exit.”Smartphones only make things harder, threatening bowel, rectal, and mental health, along with hygiene. “After a few minutes, there’s nothing productive going on.” Also, flushing ejects contaminated water particles about six feet in the air, spraying exposed phones with pathogens like E. In 1952, novelist Henry Miller wrote a 9,000-word jeremiad against bathroom-reading “cowards,” claiming “the moment these sorry individuals are not active, not busy, they become aware of an awesome, sickening emptiness in themselves.” But now our phones are doing the sickening. A bowel movement, above all human projects, is the body’s way of making time for the mind to roam.When I leave the bathroom’s sacred filth, I plunge back into the vortex, surrounded by screens until slumber.