Excess hair loss due to stress. What is the correlation?

Stress is a natural organism reaction to the difficult situation. In the moderate amount it can boost blood circulation and have beneficial impact on our health. However, excess stress is not only tiresome, but also harmful. What is its correlation with the condition of our hair? Contrary to appearances, a lot.

Our organism is equipped in many protective systems. One of them is stress, which in difficult situations stimulates organism to deal with the problem ahead. However, when stress is long lasting and intense, in our organism take place numerous reactions, that have damaging impact. This is why the physicians advise to avoid excess stress.

Increased stress is a threat mostly to our health, but not exclusively. It has also significant impact on the condition of our skin, nails and hair. It is responsible for, e.g. lose of elasticity by skin, dryness, discolourations and premature ageing signs such as wrinkles.

What is the stress impact on hair?

Dry, matte and rough skin is often called “stress skin”. Scalp can react to stress in similar way to face and the skin of body. It is why in the time of increased stress level, the hair condition decreases significantly. The consequences are, among many: the tight skin sensation and itching. Unfavourable effects of stress are also:

• uncontrollably frizzing hair,
• inhibited hair growth,
• inflammations of follicles,
• excess hair loss.

Increased secretion of the stress hormone and invalid circulation in skin is a consequence of chronic nervous tension. The result is disorder in processes taking place in follicles. Hair grow much slower, or sometimes stop growing in general. Hair bulbs weaken and you start to loose more hair than normal. Stress can cause Telogen effluvium, which happens due to changes in the growth cycle of hair, when a large number of hair go into the resting phase at the same time.

There are several ways to fight against unfavourable stress impact on hair condition. Most of all you have to take care of more intense hydration and nourishment of hair. You may want to consider use of moisturising shampoo, that do not disrupt the lipid barrier on skin and hair. Hair serum can also come handy. It will complement deficits of nourishing ingredients in hair.