Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), intestinal infections like salmonella, gastroenteritis, shigellosis, and roundworms, and even anxiety can cause string-like poop. If IBS is what’s causing thin stools, you may also experience other symptoms like bloating, gas, stomach pain, and mucus in your waste (via Web MD), and if the stringy poop has to do with an infection, you may also experience fever, nausea, vomiting, muscle pain, headache, blood in your stool, shortness of breath, coughing or wheezing, and in the case of roundworms, actual worms in your feces.
What’s going on in your mind (like anxiety and depression) can also contribute toward stringy stools, explained functional gastroenterologist Dr. Sameer Islam via YouTube. “It’s called the brain-gut axis. There’s a connection … Sometimes the treatment for what’s going on in your colon may be treating what’s going on right here (the brain),” said the expert.
Straggly thin stools could also be indicative of more serious health conditions like colorectal and anal cancer. Although you probably don’t have to worry about this unless there are other symptoms like blood in your stool, diarrhea, incontinence, and other changes in your poop, unexplainable weight loss, stomach pain, anemia, and vomiting, narrow stools from colorectal cancer occur because of the “narrowing or obstruction of the colon,” according to gastroenterologist Dr. Elizabeth Rajan (via Mayo Clinic).