From Mel Magazine: Does reading help you poop? Like any good story on the toilet, this common misconception has a twist… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now! 

The tradition of reading on the toilet may be as old as wiping our bums, but as we’ve stopped using newspapers and catalogs to clean ourselves with, why have we continued to find new ways to read on the toilet?

Experts suspect there may be several reasons for this, most notably that there might be a type of muscle memory with reading that gets our bowels moving. At the very least, reading helps poopers distract themselves and potentially relax. “With nothing to preoccupy them on the toilet, some people tense up or strain, overthinking about going and not allowing their bowels to relax,” family physician Peter Bailey explains. “This relaxation of the pelvic floor is key to easily passing stool.”

This may be particularly important for people who tend to be more stressed or anxious. “For people who are high-strung, reading probably does help them poop more easily,” Ben Tanner, a physician assistant, tells me. “That’s because it kind of distracts them, and relieves their anxiety a bit to be reading the book.”

More importantly, the distraction might be why we don’t think our own shit stinks. “In addition, reading can have the ability to distract you from the odor while going, though this is a minor benefit,” Bailey says.

While this doesn’t appear to be a topic that’s been scientifically studied in detail, Bailey isn’t the only expert to connect these ideas. David Rosenbaum, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, raised the question of why we can tolerate our smell enough to finish an article or page. In a 2017 piece for Psychology Today, Rosenbaum concluded we probably can read through our shit smell for the same reason we don’t feel as ticklish if we tickle ourselves: Our self-perceptions are generally less accurate than our perceptions of others because our brains engage in some level of automatic suppression of stimuli we produce. This is best understood when it comes to visual information, in the sense that what people see in the mirror is at least slightly skewed from how others view them.

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