Ladies and gentlemen, we just got a new reason to stay longer in the bathroom, thanks to a new study that was conducted by researchers in Boston.

According to a study that was done by researchers from the Department of Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre in Boston, Massachusetts, holding your poo can negatively impact your overall mental wellbeing.

Be right back, I’m going to the bathroom.

The study found out that there is a relationship between chronic diarrhea, depression, and constipation in individuals.

Sarah Ballou, the lead author of the study, said bowel issues are significantly more prevalent in depressed people.

The findings of the study proved that support for the relationship between mood and specific bowel habits.

There’s an explanation for this, and that is the significant amount of serotonin, which is the happy hormone that gets created in the gut of every person.

Dr. Gill Hart, a biochemist and the scientific director of the YorkTest Laboratories, said, “If you’re experiencing irregular bowel activity you could indeed also encounter low mood and there are studies to back this.”

Dr. Hart added, “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.”

Dr. Hart concluded, “If your gut is unhappy, it’s likely to affect your overall wellbeing too, physically and mentally.”

It looks like we need to work more on getting that poo out.