How Does Stress Impact Hair Loss?
Stress is a normal part of life, and most of us are good at dealing with stress in small doses when at work or home. However, stress can have an impact on the body if it’s allowed to build up over a long-term basis, and this can be harmful. You need to understand that stress can have a permanent and difficult impact on the body and that one of the big challenges can be hair loss. Let’s look at how this is the case.
Why Does Stress Cause Hair Loss?
To understand how stress can impact hair loss, we have to look at how stress affects the body generally. When you get stressed, your body releases what is called “stress hormones”. These are designed to help you prepare to deal with a threat, and we know them as adrenaline and cortisol.
Both of these hormones play a different role in the body – adrenaline helps with blood pressure and heart rates, and cortisol pumps glucose around the body. We can clearly see that they are needed, but it can be difficult to explain to the body that you’re not dealing with a physical threat so much as someone shouting or a big project at work. These hormones are meant to help you run and fight as if you were in a crisis survival situation.
The problem is that these systems also temporarily shut down all of the non-essential biological processes in the body. It’s why you can keep going without needing to eat or sleep when you’re running on adrenaline.
Unfortunately, as much as you probably love your hair, it isn’t classed as an essential part of your body, which is why your hair follicles and parts of you which regulate hair growth are paused when you’re in a stressful situation. If you’re constantly exposed to stress, then you’re constantly losing that hair growth.
What Can You Do?
Naturally, the first and most obvious thing you can do to stop hair loss through stress is to remove yourself from stressful situations. That’s not always possible because life can often be quite stressful, and some situations are unavoidable.
However, trying to find healthy outlets for stress and making sure that you consume a balanced diet with plenty of vitamins can help you to combat stress as you encounter it. There are lots of nutrients and vitamins that are important for hair loss, so it’s worth keeping in mind.
Final Thoughts
So, stress can have a definite impact on her loss. It’s important to recognise the scope of the impact stress can have and try to minimise it where you can. Obviously, this isn’t the easiest thing to do, but it’s well worth it once you work out strategies for dealing with stress in a healthy and safe way. Hair loss caused by stress can exacerbate pre-existing genetic conditions, and it may be impossible to completely reverse the hair loss after a certain point which would necessitate the need for a hair transplant, but we can help with that.
