Yep, it's still not stress...!

Continuing on from my post on Saturday about Alya Mooro considering her feelings of failure, I've been thinking about a few other things that were written in the article, and it has inspired a series of a few posts - sorry if that's tedious!

Something which Alya advises in the article is that her hairloss was related to stress - stress she 'didn't even realise she had' and which made her friends and family feel guilty for inadvertently contributing to! Sorry, but it seems that when Doctors and 'experts' investigate our hairloss, they default to 'stress' simply because there is no other obvious trigger and no other nice, neat box! Seriously, I have done a heck of a lot research into this and spoken at length to a number of researchers and there is little if any indicators that hairloss is related to stress. In fact, much of the current research is identifying that it is anything but stress in the traditional sense of the word, as case studies show incredibly varied experiences, with little or no presence of cortisol or stress hormones.

What bugs me is that putting hairloss in the 'stress' box, simply diminishes the effect of it, and in many cases triggers the feeling of failure or leaves people feeling like they somehow could have prevented it. What's more, taking up yoga, meditation or some other 'stress reliever' that works for you personally won't make you sprout a plethora of new hairs on your head! What's more, if you think of it the other way, as I've said before, if stress was a factor, every person living through poverty, hunger, natural disasters and other intensely stressful situations would surely have no hair left?!

This is definitely something that GPs, Dermatologists and other practitioners need to be educated on. My own dermatologist was incredibly knowledgeable and said that the link to stress was unproven, any more than other triggers. The only thing which has been proven is that sometimes, intensely stressful situations can be a single trigger e.g. car accidents or similar, but that this seems to be a side-effect of the event, rather than the stress. Hairloss can have many other triggers too, including diet, general health and wellbeing and a genetic predisposition, but these are no more understood than stress!

You can read more about my own 'stress' experiences here...

Victoria x

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