Is my Anxiety Making Me Lose My Hair?

Hey, loves. We are live and I am in a new room. And so I would actually love your opinion on how to make this room beautiful. We are going to be doing future videos in this room. We're going to be doing lives in this room. I'm going to be recording classes in this room. And. And I don't really know how to set it up. So I have the door, obviously, to enter the room. And then I have this giant wall where we'll be filming against. And you can see I have, like, a little rug that's put out here. Let me actually lift up the computer so you can see a little bit. I'm there with my microphone. And so here is my room. And so I'd love to know what you guys think I should do with it. I was thinking of getting a standing desk and putting it up against the wall there so I could face the windows and we'll just kind of see what happens. And so Jared is suggesting lots of color. I totally love that. I think color is bright and happy. And that's more. Our vibe is we want to have a totally bright, happy vibe. And what kinds of patterns. I love this. I love this feedback. Keep the comments coming. And so while we're talking today, I would love to hear about your decorating ideas. And today I wanted to talk about this very important topic that I get a lot of questions about. And it has to do with your luscious locks. It has to do with your hair. So many people contact me and they're asking, hey, I've been struggling with anxiety. I've been taking benzodiazepine medications or antidepressants, and is there a relationship between my hair loss and my anxiety or my hair loss and my medications? And I'm here to explain to you how that process works and what you can do about it. So while you're examining my room and coming up with decor tips for me, I'm going to be sharing with you my favorite strategies to cope with hair loss associated with anxiety. And so I also have a blog that I'll make sure to put in the comment notes so that if you don't capture everything that I say, you'll be able to read it. It will be there provided for you. And I can tell you that hair loss with anxiety is a real thing. I have a client who she actually used to be a model, and she was known for just, like, beautiful, long, thick hair. And she went through a giant transition in her life. She ended up moving from one country to the United States. And so she immigrated to the United States, and there was a lot of stress. She was getting her visa, all these things were happening. Required a lot of emotional bandwidth with her. And she started to notice a couple of things. One is that her sleep got more difficult. And two, she felt like she was having more circles under her eyes. And then the third is that she was feeling like when she would shower and wash her hair, that she was pulling out a lot of strands of hair. And she was also having to change the drain, clean the drain out with all of the hair quite frequently. And so she started to get anxious, and she went to her doctor, and her doctor said, you know, you're getting older. Hair loss is a part of that. It could be genetic. Take some biotin. But then she took biotin and she started to develop cystic acne. And so now we have this beautiful person. She's a model, she's an entrepreneur. She moves to the United States to pursue her passion, to pursue her career, and now she has cystic acne, and she's losing her hair. And so she called me up and she's like, hey, Dr. Nicole, do you have any idea what's going on with this? I'm like, girl, I got your back. So let's talk about hair loss. And in order to do that, we have to understand how hair grows. And so if you look at the roots of your scalp, if you look at your hair, you will find proteins that are located at the root. And so we call these follicles. And so if you accidentally pull a piece of hair out, you'll see a little piece of skin. That's where the hair starts to grow. So you have the follicles, and then you have blood vessels in your scalp that feed the skin, that feed the follicles. They let the cells divide, and then your hair will push up from those cells and grow nice and long. And so we have on our head lots and lots of follicles, thousands of follicles. And they're all in a different growth cycle. So you may notice that if you get some of your hair cut that it doesn't all grow at the same length. In fact, the front of mine always seems to grow quite a lot more slowly than the other pieces in the back. And that's because our follicles will grow at different intervals. And so some will grow, some will take a couple year break, and then after a couple years, they'll start growing again. And so follicles have resting phases and growing phases. And to give you just a little bit Of a statistical tip, according to the American Academy of Dermatology, that the Average person loses 50 to 100 hairs per day. And if your hair is longer like mine, losing one piece of hair can feel quite a lot more in terms of hair loss than somebody who has really short hair losing a teeny, tiny, short little piece of hair. And so when we're looking to say, am I losing a lot of hair? Is this atypical? You want to look for a couple of things. Number one is, is the amount of hair that I'm losing changing? And number two, is there a clump on the pillow? Is the drain needing to be changed more frequently? How is the pattern of hair loss changing for me? Because that can give you a baseline where pulling hair out, our hair naturally goes through cycles. And so pulling your hair out and finding strands of hair is fairly normal. But the question is, is it normal for you? And how has it changed? And so the second thing we want to look at is what causes hair loss? And there's many things, but we want to look at specifically benzodiazepines. Those are a category of medications that are really well known and established to be associated with hair loss. And later in this live, I'll actually talk to you about which benzodiazepines are more implicated in hair loss and which are better if you are dealing with the hair loss side effect. So stay tuned for that. Other causes of hair loss could be inherited or genetic. We often see that going up the maternal side of the family tree. So if you're wondering, am I going to keep my hair? You can look at your mother's father and that'll give you a good hint. And of course, there are other variables in that, but it's one of the ways to get an idea. Also, we have alopecia areata, which is where the immune system attacks the hair follicles. And so when we're thinking about, why am I losing my hair? Why is my hair thinning? We want to look at what the immune system is doing, the medications that you're taking, because we always want to treat the cause, right? We don't want to just take biotin. Just like my friend, she took biotin and she started getting acne, and it didn't help her hair, and she wasn't treating the root cause with that. Other causes of hair loss are thyroid disease. And one interesting tip for you is you can tell, and this is a little bit difficult because people pencil their eyebrows in now, but people with hypothyroidism will often lose the lateral edges of their eyebrows. And so if you're noticing, okay, I'm losing a lot of hair, I'm tired, I'm lethargic, I'm gaining weight, and my eyebrows are thinning on the lateral edges. That might be an indicator that you need to go and have your doctor run a thyroid panel. And then, of course, stress, we know that stress, high cortisol, it impacts your hormones, it impacts your follicles, it impacts your blood sugar. And stress is a huge problem when it comes to hair loss. And we'll come back to that in a minute. Another cause is androgen dominance. Androgens are male sex hormones like testosterone or dhea, DHEA sulfate. And so that's why we call it male pattern hair loss. And so when we're looking at why am I losing my hair? We want to know, well, where is the hair loss occurring? Is it on the lateral edges of your eyebrows, or is it more where men tend to lose their hair? Or is it thinning and you're getting a widow's peak? What's happening? Where is the hair loss occurring? And then you want to actually look at your hormone levels and get those checked. I do a test that's a urine test that looks at all of the hormones, but also their metabolites. And here's an analogy of why I do that. If you're thinking about testosterone and estrogen, let's look at estrogen first. If you have a classroom of 10 kindergarteners and they've all had a really nice lunch and they're all taking their afternoon nap, and you have 10 kindergarteners in there and they're all chilling and sleeping. And then you have another classroom next door with 10 kindergarteners, but they all had fruit Roll ups, which is super high in sugar, and they're all hyped up on sugar. Right. The effect of the noise in each of the classrooms is going to vary because of the quality of what's in the room. And so you can have an estrogen that is in normal limits, but if that estrogen is all sleeping and it's being broken down into more of an inactive estrogen, it's going to behave differently in your body versus if you have that classroom of caffeinated, sugarified kids and you have estrogen metabolizing into a hyperestrogen state. And so we wanna look at not only the hormones themselves, but also their metabolites. That's going to give us data on what ways you're out of balance, what could be causing that, so that we can get you growing some luscious locks again. Although hair care products can be helpful for helping hair loss, some hair care products are actually problematic for your hair. So we want to think of the health of the scalp, the health of the follicles, the cells, the blood supply, all the wonderful things that go into hair growth. And so things like hair dyes, PO perms, hair relaxing, and other hair care products can be problematic. I try to avoid shampoos and products that have sodium lauryl sulfate in them. We've seen in the clinical research that they can be damaging to the follicle and can promote hair loss. Also, this is something that I need to pay attention to because you'll probably see in a lot of the videos and pictures I post is I have my hair pulled back and pulling back on your hair and doing really tight ponies or buns will actually pull and put pressure on the hair follicle and it can weaken the follicle and then you'll lose the hair. And so sometimes people, when they have hair thinning, especially around the front, it could be because you're wearing your hair back too much and too tight. And then also we want to think about, is there an insufficient amount of nutrients feeding those follicles and helping your hair grow? Specifically, you want to be looking at iron, zinc, you want to be looking at biotin in the right amounts. More is not necessarily better. And you want to make sure that you have a diet that's enough protein. And so there's a formula that I can share with you to calculate how much protein that you should be getting for optimal hair lusciousness. And the type of protein matters as well. So focus on more protein sources that are fish and lean meat, and try to avoid protein sources that are like red meat, like beef. Okay, so let's talk a little bit more, as promised, about the benzodiazepine. So if you're dealing with hair thinning and you're taking a benzodiazepine, your benzodiazepine could possibly be making your hair loss worse. Benzodiazepines that are more associated with hair loss are like alprazolam, diazepam, which is one of the longer acting diazepines, as opposed to the more shorter acting benzos tend to have less of that hair loss effect, like clonazepam, which is Klonopin or lorazepam. And so if you're working on tapering down and off of your benzodiazepines, have a conversation with your doctor about how your body is doing with that any side effects that you're having and maybe talking about changing up the treatment will be helpful for you. In addition, we know that we can help with the benzodiazepine taper by creating a GABA bridge. And when we have enough gaba, the body doesn't have to produce cortisol to compensate and to get into that fight or flight state. And that GABA will keep you nice and relaxed, which will help your body be able to make beautiful, luscious hair. So how do we produce gaba? How do we support gaba? One is that people try to support GABA pharmacologically by taking benzos. But there are other ways that we can do that. And my favorite way to support GABA production is with Happy Sleepy Powder. And I'll make sure to include a link for Happy Sleepy Powder in the show notes. And so you can get that. We can get that for you. It's amino acids and it works incredibly well. It will also have the side effect that you will feel less anxious, less stressed and you'll sleep better, which is amazing. The other thing that you could do to support GABA production is passionflower. It's one of my favorite herbs. We actually just had a contest in the warriors group where somebody won a bottle of passion flower by talking about how they were with their anxiety freedom homework. And I checked with her yesterday and she's loving the passion flower. It's helping with sleep, it's helping with stress and relaxation, which is super awesome. So passion flower. And then the third thing that can be really helpful for GABA support and if you're losing hair due to medications is avena sativa. Avena sativa is a plant that in the literature, it is incredibly healing for the cells of your body, especially the brain. And the vascular vasculature refers to all those wonderful blood vessels that feed your follicles and your hair and your heart and other organs in your body. Alright. The other thing that we want to do before we finish up today in terms of the question about is my anxiety causing hair loss? Is we want to support hair follicle health. We've been talking about getting to the root cause of why you might be losing your hair, talking about how we can reduce anxiety and stress in order to promote happy, healthy you and happy, healthy hair. And and now I'm going to give you my top three tips for healing hair follicles and promoting hair growth. And number one is Babe, balance your hormones. We want to talk about do you have too Much dhea? Do you have too much testosterone? Do you have too low thyroid? Do you have too much cortisol? Get your hormones tested, make sure that they're looking at all the functional metabolites and then we want to treat the cause. So that's number one. Number two is take Gotu kola. Centella is the other name. And Gotu kola is amazing. Gotu kola will heal the hair follicle, it improves vascular integrity, it reduces connective tissue breakdown. It's anti aging, it stimulates hair growth, it stimulates fingernail growth. If your nails break frequently or if they chip or if they peel, Gotu kola is your go to. And then the last thing is to take a physician grade multivitamin and that multivitamin. You want to have balanced amounts of biotin, you want to have zinc, you want to have other minerals, you want to have folate, you want to have vitamin A, vitamin C, you want to have collagen, undenatured type 2 collagen. And then also you want to have a little bit of inositol in that multivitamin, which helps with hair growth. We have some multivitamins that we love in our office. And so if you have questions about that, just leave a comment and I can get you access to that. So we've been talking about, if we rewind, we've been talking about, is my anxiety causing me to lose my hair? Is my anxiety causing hair thinning? And the answer is absolutely, possibly. So. And we want to look at what is going on in my circumstances. And a really good strategy for doing that is to go to the acknowledge section of the ACT method. The ACT method is a method that I came up with. I designed by looking at everything that I learned in the functional medicine, integrative medicine, naturopathic camp. And then I combined that data with what we learned in clinical psychology counseling specialization. So I have the best of both worlds. And I'm able to look at what are the counseling, mental health, behavioral health clinicians offering and what are the integrative practitioners offering. And by combining these pieces of data with a focus on your emotional well being, I've created the ACT method. And so the ACT method can have amazing side effects in that you will understand how you're losing your hair and what to do about it and getting to the root cause of that. To get started, go to the Anxiety Freedom Warriors Group and get our free anxiety one week challenge. That's going to get you seven days of books, videos, tips, things like that. You're going to get 14 strategies that you can start using immediately to help with stress and anxiety, to help you start healing the hair loss that's been plaguing you. And then we will also give you an invitation to a free webinar Love all of this is free. I want to have you have beautiful luscious locks. I want you to feel confident. I want you to feel beautiful. And so this is my gift for you. Okay. To rewind all the way back to the beginning. Your homework is to look in the background and give me tips on how I can make this room amazing for when we do future videos. And then your second piece of homework is to make sure that you join the Anxiety Freedom Warriors Group. It's totally free. Get the free course that Anxiety Freedom One Week challenge. Get that free course. And then when you sign up for that, make sure that you give a good email address because that's where we're going to be sending you all of the material. And if you have any questions, if there are topics that you'd like to hear more about, I would love to research them and get you the best answers available. And so let me know by sending me a dm, putting it in the comments and I will see you guys next week. I'm here on Eastern time zone and right now, Michigan, it's 121 Eastern and we will be having these lives every Wednesday and every Friday at 1 o' clock Eastern until about 1:15, 1:20 and I will talk to you soon. I'm sending you all of my love, all my happiness and just making sure that I don't have any big questions. Oh yeah, Health4Life commented. What is the link? I'm going to put that link to the blog in there in just a moment when I finish up and end the live. I'll put that. Interested that put that in there. And then I have a question about over the counter ashwagandha. I love ashwagandha and ashwagandha is really synergistic with gotu, kola or centella. And so what you might do is find a botanical blend that combines some of these wonderful happy herbs. But the most important thing when we're buying herbs is you want to make sure they come from a reputable herbal company that specializes in helping us create and make wonderful herbs for medicine. I like to use Gaia Wise Woman Herbals Professional Formulas. I have no affiliation with any of these companies but I do know about their quality controls and it's amazing and outstanding and I have supplies at my office and so if there's anything I can get you, just send me a message and we're happy to drop anything in the mail for you. That would be interesting. Alright. I am so happy to have gotten to see you guys today and I'll keep checking on the comments, so leave them here and I'll reply to all of you. I honor you, I love you. This has been Dr. Nicole Cain talking about hair loss and anxiety and I will see you guys next week. Take care, bye.