You can tell how well your body is working by looking at your hair. Healthy bodies have healthy hair that is shiny and thick. Chronically stressed bodies have lank and sometimes patchy hair from hair loss.
If you are ill or anxious, hair loses its luster and becomes flat and thin. Your hair may also be waxy due to sebaceous glands overproducing oil.
If you are losing your hair and don't know why it's happening, consider stress as a cause for your hair loss. This is because your hair shows the first signs of stress.
Complete hair loss caused by stress is usually due to a sudden, serious stressful event, whilst gradually thinning hair is caused by a build-up of day to day stresses.
Life events like giving birth, getting surgery, and moving house can all cause hair to fall out to a certain degree or even completely.
Why does stress cause hair loss?
Hairs grow in cycles that span over two years. For the first two years, a hair is growing, then for the next three months, the scalp rests before finally being shed from the scalp in the final stage of the natural hair cycle.
All hairs on your head are at different stages of the cycle which is why you don't usually lose all your hair at once. A normal rate of hair loss is 100 strands a day.
When the body goes through stress, up to 70% of your hair can stop growing and go into the resting phase early. After three months of resting, these hairs will all fall out at once which causes noticeable thinning of the hair. This is known as Telogen effluvium.
You might be confused about what has caused your hair loss because of this three-month delay, but if you have faced a relatively stressful event three months previously, chances are your hair loss is down to stress.
What Can I do About Hair Loss?
The key to tackling stress-induced hair loss is to reduce your exposure to the stressful situations you are facing. You could od this by:
- Taking time out to do something you enjoy that distracts you from stresses
- Getting plenty of exercise into your week which helps to deal with stresses effects on your body
- Practicing mindfulness so you are living in the present, not the past or the future
- Meditating for 10 minutes every morning to lower your overall stress levels
- Be careful with your hair when washing, drying, and styling it
If your hair isn't growing back as quickly as you would like, you could use a proven hair regrowth product that nourishes the scalp and encourages it to grow new, healthy hair.
Har Vokse is the best product I found on the market and has a complex but transparent Norwegian formula that has specifically been formulated to help with hair loss and the growth of new hair.
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