You'll Spend Over a Year of Your Life on the Toilet

If you've ever felt guilty about your bathroom breaks, here's some consolation: everyone else is doing exactly the same thing. The average person will spend somewhere between one and one-and-a-half years of their life sitting on a toilet.

The math is surprisingly straightforward. Most people visit the toilet four to seven times per day, spending roughly five minutes per visit. That adds up to about 20 to 35 minutes daily. Over an 80-year lifespan, those minutes pile up into months, then years.

Blame Your Phone

The smartphone has almost certainly made things worse. Before the era of infinite scrolling, the average toilet visit was closer to 3-4 minutes — get in, do the job, get out. Now that everyone has a pocket-sized entertainment centre, visits regularly stretch past the five-minute mark as we catch up on messages, social media, and whatever else we tell ourselves is urgent.

Your grandparents spent less time on the toilet than you do. They just didn't have Reddit.

The Workplace Throne

Office bathrooms have their own culture. A survey found the average worker spends just under 14 minutes per day in workplace toilets — about 56 hours per year. That's more than a full working week spent in the company restroom annually. Some workplace wellness experts actually frame these breaks as essential mental health moments during stressful workdays, which is a generous way of describing scrolling Twitter in a cubicle.

So next time someone complains you're taking too long, remind them: over a lifetime, everyone spends roughly a year or more in there. You might as well make it comfortable.