Categories: Dermatology

Stress & Hair Loss – How Anxiety Can Lead To Hair Thinning

Stress is the reaction of the body to any change that requires an adjustment and response. The body’s reaction to these changes in the form of physical, mental, and emotional responses. Stress is a normal life part. The stress can be experienced from your environment i.e. workload, your body, during alopecia areata and your thoughts. Even positive life changes such as a promotion, a mortgage, or the childbirth that produce stress.

The human body is designed in a way to experience stress and give reaction to it. Stress can be positive, to keep us alert, motivate us, and ready to avoid danger. Stress becomes negative when a person faces continuous problems without relief and relaxation between the stressors. As a result, it overworks the person and builds stress related tensions. The autonomic nervous system of the body has a built-in stress response that causes physiological changes to allow the body to battle stressful situations. This stress response is also known as the “fight or flight response” and is activated in any case of emergency. However, this response can become persistently activated during long periods of stress. The prolonged activation of the stress response causes wear and tear of the body – both physically and emotionally. For example, it can lead to hair fall, and then there is another stress of hair transplant.

Stress can cause a number of different conditions that cause the loss of hair on their own, including telogen effluvium – when your body makes more hair than normal to stop growing across the scalp. But there are various treatments for hair loss including the Prp hair treatment.

Anxiety and Hair Loss

Anxiety is a normal and normally healthy emotion. But if a person regularly feels disproportionate levels of anxiety, it may become a medical disorder.

Anxiety is a disorder that forms a category of mental health diagnoses which leads to excessive nervousness, terror, hesitation, and worry. These disorders decide how a person processes emotions and behaves, it also causes physical symptoms. Mild anxiety might be unclear and unsettling, while severe anxiety might seriously affect everyday living.

Common anxiety related hair loss metaphors:

  • Noticing your hair is thinning,
  • Noticing your hair is falling out in clusters,
  • Noticing you are getting some bald spots,
  • It seems that the hair is falling out,
  • Or thinning more than normal,
  • It seems you are going to go bald,
  • It looks like that you are losing hair on your head or at other spots on the body,
  • Noticing that there are more hair in the comb, brushes, or in the bathtub or shower,
  • You fear you are going to go bald because of the anxiety,
  • You also notice that there is an increase in the amount of hair falling out when you comb or brush your hair, when washing the skin, or it seems that you are pulling out clusters of hair at a time.

You can also encounter hair loss on either one area of the head only, or many areas of the head, or the entire head. Hair loss can also be experienced in any other part of the body, as well. It can come and go infrequently, occur commonly, or persist indeterminately. For example, hair loss, thinning, and balding may be experienced by you once in a while and not that frequently, experience it off and on, or experience hair loss every time.

Hair loss may lead, accompany, or follow an acceleration of other anxiety feelings and symptoms, or occur by itself. It can also follow an episode of nervousness, anxiety, worrying, and increased stress, or occur ‘unexpectedly’ and for no apparent reason. Hair loss can range in intensity from minor, to moderate, and to severe. For example, hair loss can be mild, moderate, or significantly noticeable. Hair loss can change from time to time and day to day. All of the above combinations and deviations are common.

As there are many medical conditions that may cause anxiety and anxiety-like feelings and symptoms, including hair loss, we recommend that all the new, altering, persistent, and recurring symptoms be discussed with your doctor. If your doctor brings about that your feelings and symptoms are especially stress related, you can then be confident that there isn’t another medical reason for them. Usually, most doctors can easily tell the difference between stress-related sensations and symptoms from those caused by any other medical conditions.

Some hair loss conditions:

If you are experiencing hair loss as a result of stress and anxiety, then there are a number of conditions you may be suffering from.

These conditions include:

If your doctor says that your hair loss is from anxiety and/or stress, then yes, stress, including the stress caused by being overly anxious, can cause the loss of hair, thinning, and balding. Being stressed and anxious i.e. worried, nervous, restless, or fearful can cause the body to produce the stress response. The stress hormones are then secreted by the stress response into the bloodstream where they travel to the targeted spots to bring about specific physiological, psychological, and emotional changes that enhance your body’s ability to deal with a threat—to either fight with or escape from it—this is the reason why the stress response is often referred to as the fight or flight response.

How can we stop and reverse anxiety associated hair loss, thinning, or balding? Hair loss that is caused by stress can be stopped and reversed by reducing the stress. When you reduce stress adequately and for sufficient time for the body to get recovered from being extremely stressed, you should see this hair loss symptom diminish. When behaving anxiously is the main source of your body’s stress, dealing with the anxiety issues that you are going through and learning to contain can reduce your body’s stress load. Some worried personalities become anxious about their hair loss. It’s important to know that if you get anxious about the hair loss then it will cause anxiety symptoms to persist, including hair loss. So it’s best to compact with your anxiety issues so that your body can recover and reduce the hair loss symptom.

It’s useful to remember that the hair loss isn’t always caused by anxiety and it’s important to get it checked by a doctor to rule out any other fundamental causes. If you find it all-clear, then you can further work on reducing your anxiety and getting professional hair reinstallation treatment.

Author BIO:

Saima Sharif is a freelance content writer. My major interest is writing content on topics such as hair fall, hair solution, home remedies for hair problems or any treatment related to this. My current adventure is My Skin Clinic (Pakistan, Oslo and London).

This post was last modified on July 25, 2023 2:15 pm

Tags: Hair Loss

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