What happens if you don use the bathroom

It takes holding your poop repeatedly, over time, to cause most of these lasting problems. Sign up for the Fatherly newsletter to get original articles and expert advice about parenting, fitness, gear, and more in your inbox every day. Please try again. Give us a little more information and we'll give you a lot more relevant content.

Your child's birthday or due date. Girl Boy Other Not Sure. Add A Child. Something went wrong. I spoke with him in an attempt to understand whether there is a physical call-and-response between my home and my body that might trigger the need to make a deposit in the porcelain bank. Or is it simply that I feel more comfortable at home?

All my stuff is there. When you enter your home, you get certain sensory inputs—smells, sights, a familiar creak in the floor, perhaps. When you get back into your home your sleep patterns will change, because the hormones that control sleep will be altered. All of these factors influence how quickly food moves through your gut. If you fill your diet with fatty, sugary, or starchy foods and don't eat enough fiber, your bowels may slow down.

Fiber — found in fruits, vegetables, and whole grains like oatmeal, popcorn, and whole-wheat bread and pasta — can keep your poop from getting hard and dry. So reach for a pear! Not enough exercise. Moving around helps food move through your digestive system. If you don't get enough active playtime — like running around outside — you could get constipated. Not enough liquids. Drinking water and other liquids keeps poop soft as it moves through your intestines.

When you don't drink enough, the poop can get hard and dry and you might get stopped up. Not going to the bathroom when you need to. Sometimes kids don't go to the bathroom when they have to. Maybe they don't want to use the bathroom at school or maybe they just don't want to stop what they're doing right then. But ignoring your body's signals that it's time to go might make it harder to poop later on.

Kids might get constipated when they're anxious about school or something at home. This can happen from something like being worried about going to a new school, or having a lot of homework and tests coming up.

Being away from home for more than a few days may make you feel a little stressed too. If you think stress is plugging things up for you, talk to an adult you trust about it.

Irritable bowel syndrome. Some kids have a condition called irritable bowel syndrome IBS. It can act up when they're stressed or when they run into some triggers, like fatty or spicy foods.