What Do I Do About My Hair Loss?
“My hair is thinning, now, what do I do?” What I’m about to tell you is the type of guidance that we give to people when they first begin their hair loss journey, they’ve noticed that their hair is starting to fall out or starting to thin, and they’re getting worried about it.
A lot of people feel very overwhelmed, and just like there’s so many options and their shampoos on Amazon and there are people saying home remedies, and there are people telling them to just go get a hair transplant, and then there are people just telling them to go on hair loss drugs.
Go talk to a doctor
The first thing that we always tell people to do, always across the board is to go talk to a doctor. Hair loss can be combated in a lot of different ways. But one thing that it’s a really good idea to rule out is to rule out whether or not it’s a vitamin or nutrient deficiency that is causing this to happen for some people. And I would say, especially for women, a lot of times a low iron level can trigger hair loss, and it can sometimes unmask more severe forms of hair loss. This is something that you need to go to a doctor.
If it’s beginning to worry you, you need to go to a doctor and begin the steps for testing to figure out if that’s what it is or if it’s genetic and only a doctor can help you with that. You need to go talk to them in order to work through this and begin those steps as well.
This is pretty standard advice. The main reason for it is that a lot of American adults have certain types of vitamin or new nutrient deficiencies. Like, for instance, Vitamin D is something that a lot of Americans are chronically low on, and vitamin D has been tied to hair growth. So it’s a really good idea to go to a doctor and get a blood panel done and see if your doctor can help you work through if there is something that you need to be consuming or putting into your diet that is not there already that is causing or triggering, rather, your hair loss. It’s a good idea to rule that out because then you can move on to other options. But the good news is if it’s something simple, you can fix it so easily, and if you can fix it easily, it prevents you from having to go into more extreme and more expensive solutions.
The minimum effective dose for things to fix your hair loss is always the best option. So if you can fix your hair loss by going to the doctor, talking to them about your problem, and then seeing if there’s something you can do and add into your daily diet or even a vitamin regimen that will fix the hair loss, how great would that be? That way you never have to go into more extreme solutions, and you can fix it there instead of chasing it down for a very long time.
Oftentimes hair loss is so difficult and so personal that oftentimes people run to the biggest solution instead of trying to work through the smaller ones first when sometimes the smaller ones would have fixed it for them and at least eliminated the trigger so that they could have a little bit more information and maybe pick something again that’s a little bit less extreme.
Learn how to minimize or alleviate stress
This one is just annoying here, and I know that that’s true. So the second thing is to alleviate stress. I’m laughing as I say it because we all know that this is near impossible to do, but it still needs to be said. And the fact is if you can alleviate stress or at least minimize it in your daily life, sometimes stress can cause Telogen effluvium (TE) which is basically where a large amount of your hair falls out all at once.
And it’s just a fact that those things are tied together and that if you alleviate stress, sometimes you can help keep your hair from falling out. Again, this would be something that you would talk to a doctor about to determine what type of hair loss it is. But it is a known fact that extreme stress can cause large hair fall all at once. And so that’s something that you might want to look into because that type of hair loss can sometimes unmask other types of hair loss. And it’s a really good idea to get a doctor involved because if you can get a doctor involved at these early stages, they can help you figure out what’s going on and then help you figure out how to treat it.
I know, too, that especially during this time, a lot of people are working from home or just have undue stress on them for various financial reasons as well. We’re just all under a lot of stress right now, and I’m sorry that that’s happening, and I’ve experienced it. I’m sure that you have as well, and we really feel for you, and we know that it’s difficult to cope. You can take some minor steps, though, to help with that stress.
Keep your phone in a different room at night
One that’s really huge that across the board has been proven to help reduce stress is keeping your phone in a different room from you at night, especially if there is a way for you to get a six dollar alarm clock from Amazon and start relying on that and putting your phone in a different room.
Do breathing exercises
Just every once in a while, as hard as it is if you’re working from home and you’re on your computer and you just feel like you’re constantly on just every once in a while, step away for five minutes, even put it on your calendar if you have to. If you’re a remote worker and just breathe.
I know that if you have kids running around, that’s really difficult. But see if you can at least take a few minutes for yourself just to take a few deep breaths, see if you can just have a little time to step away, even if you’re not working remotely to walk outside and just stand in the Sun for four minutes and just breathe. Just breathe. I’m very passionate about this because I know that a lot of us have been under a lot of stress recently. At the beginning of COVID, I myself had an issue with Telogen effluvium (TE) where I had quite a bit of hair loss just due to the stress of having our business closed for some time.
And I know that a lot of people are struggling with this right now, so something you can do is just carve out 4 to 5 minutes and just breathe in and out, and that will help a little bit, which is making you feel more in control and just kind of focusing on breathing.
There’s a ton of YouTube resources of people who are professionals at teaching breathing meditation, as hippy-dippy as it sounds, it does help, and just breathing and concentrating and focusing on reducing stress and just feeling a little bit more in control of your situation by just breathing in and out. That’s a good way to help yourself.
Those two simple things, take five minutes a day to breathe and see if you can move your phone from your bedroom to outside to a different room so that you’re not staring at the screen, keeping yourself up late, interfering with your sleep, and then also just the scientific stress of having your phone in the same room as you cause more stress. So eliminate those things and see if that helps.
Try out YAMA Studios’ Breakfast Protocol
All right. So the third thing is something we call the protocol, and basically, the protocol is something that we at YAMA Studios have created. This is something that Ryan and the team and I do tend to tell our clients. And what we tell them is we put them on a very specific breakfast regimen that we feel helps to cover some nutritional bases for most people, and barring any allergies is a good way to get the type of nutrients that you need to help your hair and your scalp be healthy. So I’m going to describe to you what this is right now. It’s very low cost and it’s not super major, so it’s not going to change your breakfast routine too much.
Another note, though, to the women who may be watching this, if you get up first thing in the morning and you drink coffee before you eat food, stop doing that.
This is something that I myself learned and that I have instituted in my life. While it’s not easy to the point where I’ve been drinking coffee before I’ve been eating food for literally years. And it’s hard when I first started doing this, it actually makes you feel sick to your stomach a little bit if you’re used to drinking coffee before you eat food. But it’s very important, and I have to make myself do this. But I have noticed an improvement in both my hair strength and my scalp health since I started doing this but I don’t drink caffeine until I have food in my stomach.
You need to eat or have a protein shake or do something. It doesn’t have to be a lot but what happens when you drink that much caffeine you’re triggering cortisol, and what that’s gonna do is it’s gonna put you in stress mode. It’s gonna stress your body and it can actually mess with your hormones, and when that happens, you can mess with your hair growth.
So it’s a really good idea to just before you put that stress-inducing caffeine, as much as you want it and need it, which I totally get. But before you do that to yourself, eat some food.
So here’s the protocol:
- 2 eggs, cook it however you want.
- Spinach, cook it however you want—you can eat it raw, you can cook it, it really doesn’t matter.
- A serving of kimchi (3 or 4 ounces)
- Salmon or some sort of fatty fish. Even a can of tuna if you don’t have anything else.
The protocol helps to cover some of the nutritional bases that can sometimes affect your hair growth if you’re not getting enough of those things. Kimchi—I’ve talked about it in another video but kimchi is like a hair growth superfood. It’s very good for helping specifically women but also men to regrow an amount of hair. It’s not gonna be crazy. It’s not like using a hair loss drug. But it can help. So that’s a really good place to start. So institute the protocol which again is 2 eggs, spinach, 3 or 4 ounces of kimchi, and a serving of fatty fish like tuna or salmon or sardines work if you’re in a pinch.
Conclusion
This basically covers everything so if your hair is starting to thin, here’s what you gotta do. Go to the doctor. Try to alleviate some stress with small daily practices that don’t inconvenience you that much and are repeatable every day. And then three, you can try to do the protocol, which is two eggs, spinach, kimchi, and then some sort of fatty fish every morning and see if that helps you to cover some of the nutritional bases that you may be missing—that may be triggering your hair loss.
Almost all humans at some point or another are going to experience hair loss. So you’re not alone.
And it is a really good idea to go ahead and bring in your doctor on this because that’s what they do. They help solve medical issues, and this is a medical issue. So it’s a good idea to go ahead and get them involved and do some detective work, problem-solving to figure out if there’s something that’s contributing to it.
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