Healing My Hair; Dry, Thinning and Lacklustre Hair Woes

I’ve been on a bit of a journey for the past 8-10 months and it all started with my hair.

If you’ve been following the blog for a while you’ll recall a hair post where I regale the trials and tribulations of having mixed race hair, and how I had gotten to manage it better with the support, genius and endless patience of my dear friend and guru hairdresser. You can read all about it here.

However fast-forward a year and my hair seems to be rebelling again. Not in it’s usual way, resisting the hairbrush and laughing in the face of my wide-tooth-comb. No, this time it was a little more serious. My hair was, well, for want of a better word, poorly.

I began noticing severe breakage, dryness I couldn’t quench with any of my usual remedies, and drastic thinning. I was as you can imagine alarmed. A woman losing her hair is quite an emotional thing.

I did all the usual things like staying up until midnight reading blog posts and scouring Pinterest for a cure. I diligently got to work stocking up on organic honey, eggs and apple cider vinegar and mixing up hair masks to cure my woes.

Now some of these tips and tricks did help a little, but temporarily. Condition was restored for a day but my straw like tresses made an unwelcome comeback. The thinning and breakage continued.

So rather then continue treating the symptoms I thought it likely to be more beneficial to consider the cause and tackle that.

After an honest reflection on my lifestyle I realised that there had been several changes I had either made or had been incumbent upon me, which could have contributed to the sudden and persisting change in my hair condition:

 

Diet:

I became vegetarian last summer, which meant quite a drastic change to my diet. I had previously been pescetarian for 13 years and then when I got married I decided to try meat eating again and did so for quite some years.

However my conscience couldn’t cope and so last year I returned to my preferred vegetarian diet. Despite this change reconciling me emotionally I have to be honest and say that it probably hasn’t done me the world of good nutritionally. Now I’m not saying that a vegetarian diet isn’t healthy or that it lacks protein, but what I am saying is that this particular vegetarian, surviving on toast and jam and chocolate, probably gave her body a bit of a dietary shock.

Diet plays a vitally intrinsic role in our body’s functioning and so it stands to reason that any drastic changes to diet can and will be manifest in how the body responds. I suspect that the energy my body needed day to day to get by was more then my toast and jam diet could sustain, hair growth and health was likely at the bottom of my body’s priorities.

 

Stress:

Now this is something I don’t feel at all comfortable writing about. Stress is such a personal and subjective experience, one that is extremely hard to define.

Everyone’s experience is different as is our individual tolerance to stress. There are also different stressors, some good and some bad. Last year I had a lot of good stressors in my life, but none the less the impact of the stress on my body was distinguishable. I gained weight (toast and jam diet), my skin looked dull and my hair was falling out.

I’m not about to start telling you how to manage stress, if I had the capability to do that I would write a book and retire to the Bahamas (Pig Island in the Exumas- it’s my dream), but what I will say is that you can manage your stress, no matter how impossible it might seem at the time. You just need to take a step back and honestly review the situation objectively.

Once you have done this and you have identified the cause of your stress you have 2 choices; Address the trigger or address your response to the trigger. I find most often it is the latter. Often stress is caused by a stimulus outside of our sphere of control, therefore the only thing we can control is how we respond- how we feel. Once you decide to manage your feelings, your response to the stress, you instantly feel in control again. This will go some way toward restoring your power and diminishing some of the stress, but mostly choosing to be happy and finding ways to reduce your symptoms of stress will be the kindest thing you can do for yourself.

 

So having made these discoveries, here’s what I did about it:

I addressed my diet and I now try to include at least 3 portions of fruit and veg per day – I know, I’m way off the 5 RDA, but come-on, I’m trying. I also don’t count jam as a portion!

I also try to include a source of protein, such as quorn, tofu and nuts. This is harder then it sounds. I hate cooking and I don’t have access to quick or convenience food. However just making this commitment to myself helps me to feel more in control.

I also drink more water as I feel that hydration is as essential to your  hair as it is to your skin. I’m not winning on this one but I acknowledge the need for improvement, so I feel somewhat in control of my destiny again ( less stress, remember)

I’m trying to reduce my refined sugar also, but seriously, it is an addiction. If there were a refined sugar rehab I would have checked in by now.

For my stress I continue to try to find ways to be kind to myself. Once a month I attend a Gong Bath, this is a wonderfully immersive healing experience. If you’d like to know more, stay posted, I’ll be writing about this sometime soon.

I’m also starting back at Yoga. Being considerably overweight and in poor physical condition, this one is a little daunting. However I am returning to a type of yoga called Kundalini. This yoga is extremely gentle and doesn’t require feet behind head type poses. If you’d like to know more about this you can have a read here. Kundalini Yoga is a little rare so you may have to travel for a class. Trust me it’s worth it.

I’m also going to be taking more regular exercise and getting outdoors. Starting with gentle walking but I hope to do the couch to 5k challenge now that the summer has arrived. Physical activity helps to produce endorphins, which neutralise stress hormones such as Cortisol and Adrenaline. Endorphins are also our happy hormone and help improve our mood. The more of this we produce, the better we feel.

I also find that a good belly laugh does me the world of good. Laughing produces, unsurprisingly, lots of the happy Endorphin hormones. It is also proven that the positive health effects of laughter on our bodies last up to 24 hours!

 

So has this worked?

Well in all honesty it’s hard to tell. My hair condition is certainly improving; the breakage is less than it was, it certainly isn’t as dry and the thinning seems to have stalled. There’s no quantitative measure but if it were a qualitative study, the outcomes are looking favourable. Change is coming and looks as though it is for the better.

My hair is less straw like and I can occasionally blow dry it without looking like I’ve spent a month in the Sahara.

Full disclosure here, I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you that as well as these small changes to my lifestyle I have embarked on a campaign of conditioning treatments, vitamin supplements and that I have not processed my hair in over 7  months! Yep not a single keratin blow dry and no colour! I look quite literally horrific; but hey, it’s working.

I’ll be sharing a little more about the hair products I have been using in upcoming posts, so do pop back and check these out. I’ve made some great discoveries as well as them being a fantastic adjuvant to the changes I’ve made.

My hair healing journey continues, I’ll keep you updated along the way.

 

Amellia Mae