According to a study from the Department of Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre in Boston, Massachusetts, holding in a poo can negatively impact your mental wellbeing.
The findings analysed the relationship between chronic diarrhoea, constipation and depression in individuals.
Lead author Sarah Ballou explains that bowel issues are "significantly more prevalent" in depressed people and "our findings provide support for the relationship between mood and specific bowel habits."
However, there's an explanation: a significant amount of serotonin - the happy hormone - originates in the gut.
"If you’re experiencing irregular bowel activity you could indeed also encounter low mood and there are studies to back this," Dr Gill Hart, a biochemist and the scientific director of YorkTest Laboratories, told Metro.
"The gut is home to hundreds of trillions of microorganisms which form part of the gut-microbiome-brain-axis. Mood states have been linked with the composition of the microbiome in mentally and physically healthy adults. If your gut is unhappy, it’s likely to affect your overall wellbeing too, physically and mentally."
Guess we should all take a bit more time out of our day jobs to visit the washroom...for our sanity, of course.
