Hair Loss Due to Stress and Anxiety

Can people get Hair Loss Due to Stress and Anxiety? in this article, we will discuss just that and look at the deeper root causes that relate to stress and a hormone called cortisol.

What is Cortisol?

Cortisol is a stress hormone that is made by your adrenal glands those are two little glands on top of your kidney and they react when your body goes through too much stress.

It's very very destructive on proteins, it will start using proteins as fuel so it'll start to break down proteins and turn them into sugar and that's why you may also have a blood sugar issue when you have too much cortisol and even create diabetes.

High - Low Cortisol 

If the cortisol is too high you're going to have protein loss in the body primarily hair, nails, skin, and collagen. If the cortisol is too low you're also going to lose your hair too more like alopecia which is patches of hair that tend to fall out.

When you go through a severe loss of protein it can shock the adrenal and then you lose cortisol function which is an immune function and you start developing an autoimmune where your antibodies are attacking its own tissue primarily the roots of the hair.

Autoimmune Condition

So you can have an autoimmune condition where it's attacking the roots and causing patches of hair to fall out. But it's all triggered by a stress event which leads to low cortisol after that. 

So really you just need normal cortisol phases to include an antigen, catagen, and telogen those are basic phases of growth so an antigen is the growth of the hair and catagen is the transition between growth and the maintaining of the hair.

Natural Hair Loss

Believe it or not, you lose about a hundred hairs a day seems like a lot but that's normal you have a lot of different hairs in your head so it's not that much of course but over time it will mount up. 

So what can we do about this, number one we have to remove any type of external stress whether its environmental from your job or maybe it's a relationship problem it's a family problem. You need to do whatever you can to resolve or improve those stresses because unless you handle that stress these symptoms will continue.

Internal Stress

Next one is internal stress over your lifetime you're going to go through a lot of stress there are techniques that you can use to relieve stress in your life such as a relaxing massage or even acupressure.

Treatment

You can actually take supplements for stress and feed the hair the nutrition that it needs because stress depletes B vitamins, calcium and potassium and the last thing you can do is increase growth hormone.

Growth Hormone

Growth hormone is kind of like the opposite of cortisol. Growth hormone protects proteins it helps you with stress it's anti-aging opposed to cortisol which actually increases aging which makes your hair fall out and causes wrinkles.

Quality Sleep

So growth hormone is triggered by high-quality sleep intense exercise with a good amount of protein and lastly and most importantly is intermittent fasting.

Take six meals a day is bad if you want to regain hair growth. Ideally, you want three meals a day or even two without any snacks because that intermittent fasting will then stimulate growth hormones and could decrease cortisol.

So is hair loss due to stress and anxiety is a real condition that is often overlooked. I hope that gives you a better understanding of how the effects of stress can have an impact on hair loss.