Why more people are shedding hair during covid with Dr Sophia Kogan

Bulletproof radio, a state of high performance. You've told me off camera that you've just seen a huge increase in hair shedding recently. What's going on? Not personally, but just in the world. What's going on with that?

Personally too?

Oh, personally too. Well, your hair looks pretty good. Looks like it did last time, but you have a lot of it, so I guess your stuff works.

But yeah, okay, you know, I think so. My hair started shedding again when the pandemic started. And I just, I noticed it and I felt it and I was like, oh, I'm very stressed. You have to be genetically predisposed to some degree. And. And I am. And that happens to me. Anytime I'm stressed. I get to manifest like this. Not everybody will, but a lot of people do. And right now, more than ever, people are coming forth saying that they're shedding more than ever. Now, the reason that this statistic, it's not just something that I made up in my head. I noticed myself and I fel. That was going to come, but now we're hearing that from our doctors. So I speak to a lot of dermatologists who treat people, and what they are seeing is a humongous rise in something called telogen effluvium. I can explain more about that.

We talked about it last time, but some people didn't hear that episode. So define it for people. Sounds pretty fancy.

Yeah. So the follicle, right? All of our follicles are on their own biological clock. They're kind of ticking and going at their own pace, each one. And they're going from the growth phase, which is called antigen, to the regression phase, catagen, to the resting phase, telogen, after which they're just slated to kind of fall out. So at some point they're just there resting. And what happens is when we have a tremendous amount of stress, like for instance, like we had even earlier on in the pandemic, and even currently, I would say that there's a little bit of a shift in terms of how stress is perceived now. It was really acute and now it's a little bit more chronic for us. But from that point, when you have this massive amount of stress now, it could be both physical or emotional. So it could be a strong shift in diet, a huge weight loss. It could be. To your point about fasting, it could be emotional, psycho emotional. Perceived threat. A life threatening event. Pandemic is not a life threatening event. Like what is. Right. So. So a lot of people. So for a lot of people, so that what happens is that those follicles are synchronistically shifted a huge number of them into that resting phase. So the body says, I want to pull them internally. I don't really need or care about hair. I want to preserve my life. And so it goes to the vital organs. And so that's what happens to the hair growth cycle. And it shifts. And all of a sudden, we have a massive amount of hair shedding about months later. And that's actually what happens to a lot of people, some people that progresses to a more chronic situation.