It is not as rare as you thought.
You settle in the bathroom and prepare to start with yours. But suddenly, you run into a distraction: your nose starts to drip. You’re not getting a cold, and your nose was suspiciously snot- free when you were heading to the bathroom, so what the hell is going on?
You might think it’s a coincidence if you often find yourself blowing your nose while you’re on the toilet. However, it is actually more common than you think, so much so that there is indeed a fancy name for this phenomenon.
It’s called runny nose on defecation, and, you guessed it, it basically just means a runny nose when you’re about to defecate.
To understand why this happens, you must first understand what happens in your body when you defecate.
“The intestines are regulated by a complex coordination of nerve signals,” explains physician Michael Rice, a gastroenterologist at the University of Michigan Gastroenterology Medicine Clinic.
Its gastrointestinal (GI) tract is controlled by your autonomic nervous system, which is made up of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nerves that coordinate with each other to keep your body functioning without any conscious effort; This includes functions such as regulating heart rate and blood pressure, temperature, sexual response, tears, digestion … and defecation.
Basically, parasympathetic nerve fibers in the pelvis are responsible for triggering peristaltic contractions in the lower colon, which move waste through your digestive tract and eventually evacuate stool, adds Dr. Rice.
Those same autonomic nerves that activate to help you drive poop also regulate blood supply to the nasal area and mucus secretion, he says. So when your body prepares to evacuate, it also activates the nerves in the nasal regions as a by-product, which can cause the nose’s blood vessels to widen.
Basically, defecation puts your body into a sensory overdrive, dilating the vessels in the nasal region, causing a runny nose.
It’s all a connection to the evacuation process, it really doesn’t have as much to do with your bowel movements as you might think. Still, leaning forward while pooping may allow previously released nasal secretions to drip down your nose, rather than down the back of your throat, as they would if you were lying down, Dr. Rice says.
So leaning forward can make a runny nose worse, and it’s not helping your main goal at all. A better posture is to sit correctly, with your back straight and upright, with both feet on a thick phone book or a low-level step to adopt a squatting-like posture, suggests doctor Christine Lee, gastroenterologist at the Cleveland Clinic. This places your rectum at a better angle, making it easier to evacuate.
It’s also possible that a runny nose during a bowel movement is caused by something called vasomotor rhinitis, in which a nose irritant (such as strong odors, humidity, temperature changes, or even an emotional change) triggers the production and release of mucus.
Still, “although particularly penetrating emotions and odors (such as those that occur in the bathroom) can cause runny nose, it is unlikely to be the primary mechanism behind runny nose in defecation, ” says Dr. Rice.
Simply put, a runny nose while defecating is a normal physiological response. There’s usually nothing to worry about if it only happens when you’re trying to evacuate, he says.
If your runny nose is persistent or associated with headaches, fever, dizziness, or events such as head or nose trauma, you should consult your doctor, Rice suggests.
In a very rare case, if you recently suffered a head injury or a brain or sinus injury or surgery, it could indicate something called cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) loss, where the fluid surrounding the brain is leaking through the skull towards the nose, explains Dr. Lee. In that case, you’ll probably notice that leaning forward and down worsens a runny nose.
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