Your
hair has a way of telling you if your body is in balance. If you are
healthy - physically as well as emotionally - your hair will be radiant
and shining and your scalp pliant and moist.
If you are not well
physically, or if you are upset emotionally, your hair becomes dull and
lifeless - it will begin to fall out, and your hair will become waxy
with the overproduction of your traumatised sebaceous glands.
If
your hair is thinning or you are experiencing baldness and it seems
abnormal either because you are young or female, it is more than likely
that stress is the culprit of hair loss. Your hair is one of the first
places your body shows distress. Illness, medication and imbalances in
nutrition all show up in you hair and scalp.
Usually, it is not
mild job or life stress that triggers hair loss, more likely it is
extremely serious stress to the body that causes hair to stop growing
and fall out. These types of stress can be initiated by some types of
medications, diabetes, thyroid disorders and even extreme emotional
stress, but also can be caused by commonplace life events like
childbirth, miscarriage and surgery.
Any major change in our
lives can be reflected in the condition of our hair, scalp and skin. We
reflect our health and well-being in the condition of our hair and
scalp.
But how does stress actually effect hair loss? Well hair
grows in repeating cycles. The active growth phase lasts around two
years and is followed by a resting phase that spans three months, after
which the hair falls from the scalp. Normally, every strand of hair in
your head is at a different point in this cycle, so the shedding is
barely noticeable: a few strands in the shower drain, some more on your
brush, a hair or two on your pillow. A normal head sheds at most 100
strands of hair a day.
However, when the body undergoes extreme
stress, as much as 70 percent of your hair can prematurely enter the
resting phase. Three months later, these hairs begin to fall out,
causing noticeable hair loss.
The person will not become
completely bald and the thinning will be fairly unnoticeable. However,
it is this three month delay and the fact that the trigger seems so
unrelated that causes confusion on the part of the patient concerned
about hair loss.
Fortunately, in most cases hair will begin to
grow back within six months. However, some people may face further
periods of severe stress that may trigger the whole process to being
again cause more hair loss resulting in a more long-term problem.
