Tag: trichotillomania

Which trichotillomania remedies actually work? (Or, Hair: A Retrospective)
life

Which trichotillomania remedies actually work? (Or, Hair: A Retrospective)

J.2 Comments

If you’ve followed me on Instagram, you probably know that I’ve had a shaved head for years at this point. A few months back, I decided to experiment with letting some of my hair regrow. This was mainly a test to see how much of my particular case of trichotillomania is an ingrained habit, versus a deeper issue. Half of my head is currently almost shoulder-length, while the other half is still shaved.

Recently, this all got me thinking — out of all of the things I’ve tried to beat this, which ones actually seemed to help? Trichotillomania is commonly regarded as a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Believe it or not, pulling out the “right” hairs (usually ones that are of a different texture than the others) can give a dopamine rush, while failing to do so can cause feelings of anxiety and an intense compulsion to find and pull the offending hair. It’s not the kind of thing you can sort out just by switching shampoos.

Photo by Luis Quintero on Pexels.com

With that said, here are the things I tried… and how well they measured up against my apparent desire to destroy my own head:

1. Tea tree shampoos and conditioners

These feel nice. They’re supposed to help with itching and give the scalp a cooled, refreshed feeling. This is all very temporary, however. A couple of hours after a wash and condition, the desire to pull is back.

2/10

2. Fidget toys and objects that mimic hair pulling

These might work for some, but they didn’t really do it for me. The problem here is that the feeling of needing to pluck my hair doesn’t really feel like it originates in my hands, so keeping them busy doesn’t get rid of the tickle in my scalp or the feeling that there’s a weird hair I need to get rid of.

A lot of the objects geared toward people with trichotillomania also aren’t refillable. You could end up going through multiple vinyl plucking toys per week, and what do you do with all of them afterward?

Fidget objects that mimic hair pulling or skin picking are also somewhat controversial. For some people, they can help redirect the behavior to an object. For others, they may just reinforce the undesirable picking/plucking.

1/10

3. Smoothing hair products

Ugh, no.

My thought was that, since the desire to pluck starts as a subtle tickling sensation on my scalp, which progresses to me finding a hair that’s grown in with an odd texture, smoothing products would help. This was not the case. In fact, they either didn’t make any difference at all, or made my hair feel oilier and itchier. No. No, thank you.

0/10

4. Essential oils

Like the tea tree oil shampoos and conditioners, these helped for brief periods. The oils I used were chiefly rosemary and cedar, both credited with helping to regrow hair and improve hair and scalp health in general. They smelled nice. They felt nice. They made my scalp feel better, but they didn’t last very long.

4/10

5. Head massagers

These things look a bit like metal spiders with a wooden handle. You hold the handle and use the spidery bit to massage your scalp. They feel nice, they help temporarily increase blood flow to that area, but they don’t really get rid of the urge to pull.

3/10

6. Hair serums

Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels.com

These are often either witch hazel based, or castor oil based. You find castor oil in formulas to moisturize the scalp and promote hair growth and witch hazel in ones for scalp health. Like other topical treatments mentioned here, these serums seemed to fall into one of two camps. They either 1) felt soothing for a couple of minutes, or 2) just made me feel stickier/greasier and itchier. The cooling sensation of some non-oil-based serums did seem to make a difference, but they needed to be reapplied frequently. The oil-based serums did seem to help regrow hair, but they were also a lot heavier. but weren’t soothing.

5/10

7. Gloves

Like a parent trying to keep a kid with chicken pox from scratching, I tried sticking gloves on my hands. “Maybe,” I thought, “if I just make my hands worse at pulling my hair, I’ll eventually stop.”

The trouble is that the things that it harder to pull at my hair also made it harder to do absolutely everything else. There was zero incentive to keep gloves on, and very easy to forget them somewhere after cooking, washing up, etc. While this solution might work for kids, or people who don’t need to perform a lot of hands-on tasks, it didn’t for me.

3/10

8. Self-hypnosis

People have used self-hypnosis to help with all kinds of addictions and bad habits in the past, so why not this? I mean, I have a vivid memory of being a tiny child, sitting on the couch while my mother watched a self-hypnosis video to quit smoking. (It didn’t work and I felt like I was in a Twilight Zone episode, but I still figured this was worth a shot.)

It didn’t work, and I felt like I was in a Twilight Zone episode. Other people have used self-hypnosis with success, but it definitely fell short for me here.

1/10

9. Anxiety medication

OCD is connected to anxiety, so anxiety medication is sometimes used to help relieve the negative feelings connected to the obsessive-compulsive behavior. Unfortunately, trichotillomania is notoriously difficult to medicate. While anxiety medication did help tremendously when it came to controlling my panic disorder, it didn’t really do much for the hair pulling.

3/10

10. Cognitive behavioral therapy

I’ve written before about how CBT was less than helpful for me. In this case, it failed at lessening my trichotillomania because it relies on reasoning. You can’t reason yourself out of something you didn’t reason yourself into.

While it might help some people deal with feelings of anxiety and shame surrounding the behavior or the effect that it has on their appearance, it didn’t seem to touch the root cause of trichotillomania itself.

0/10

10. Hair vitamins

Photo by Polina Tankilevitch on Pexels.com

What if the weird hairs and tickly feeling of needing to pull were the symptoms of some kind of weird deficiency? What if I just wasn’t growing healthy hair, and my scalp was irritated because of it? What if I just straight-up ran out of other things to try?

So, I tested out multiple brands of “hair vitamin.” These are multivitamin and mineral supplements that focus primarily on hair and skin health. If you aren’t experiencing a deficiency in any of the vitamins and minerals in them, however, they’re primarily a fast way to give yourself nausea and neon yellow urine. They did not, unfortunately, help suppress the urge to pick at my hair.

1/10

11. Shaving it off and letting it grow back

A photo of me, sitting in front of a tree. My head is completely shaved.

It takes a while to break a habit. I figured that, if I couldn’t suppress the desire to pull, I could get rid of my hair. Without weird hairs to pull out and reinforce the behavior (and addiction dynamic), maybe my brain could sort itself out.

I kept my hair buzzed for a few years. The trouble is, as soon as it’d start to grow back to a pluckable length, I was right back to hunting for weird hairs to yank out.

However, keeping my hair short and unpluckable did give my scalp a chance to recover, and that’s important.

5/10

12. Shaving it off, but strategically

Since shaving it completely and letting it grow back didn’t work the way I wanted to, I hit upon another potential solution: What if I just shaved the areas that I plucked the most? I wouldn’t have to commit to a full buzzcut if I didn’t want to, but I still wouldn’t be able to pull at the areas that I used the most.

Lo and behold, this finally seemed to work. Right now, I’ve got hair down to my shoulder on one side, and a full shave on the other. I make it work.

This might not be a great option for people who chiefly pluck from the crowns of their heads, but can definitely be a useful tool for those who pluck from the sides or bottom. For me, it’s been working very well.

9/10

Trichotillomania sucks, to be blunt. It’s hard to treat and can be a source of deep shame (particularly for women from cultures who highly value hair). It’s also not good for you, since it can damage your scalp and eventually cause your hair to stop growing back. There are a lot of options out there to help with the symptoms, but almost no effective permanent solutions. This is what worked and didn’t work for me, but you may find that your results are different. The important thing to remember here is that your hair doesn’t determine your worth as a person — whatever helps you live without anxiety, shame, and physical pain is worth pursuing, even if it isn’t a perfect solution to trichotillomania.

Doing No-Poo with Hard Water (No Distilled Water Necessary)
Environment · life

Doing No-Poo with Hard Water (No Distilled Water Necessary)

J.2 Comments

I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with no-poo.

If you’re not familiar, “no-poo” is a hair care method that involves shunning shampoo. This doesn’t mean that you don’t clean your hair, you just do it a little differently. An initial baking soda scrub gets rid of oil, and a vinegar rinse afterward neutralizes it and makes your hair soft and shiny.

Theoretically.

My custodial parent had very different hair from mine, and they weren’t interested in learning the difference or teaching me how to properly care for myself. As someone who was raised to believe that I was just cursed with oily hair and the only cure was copious amounts of shampoo, I’ve always been curious about how people with other hair types take care of theirs. Do they have to shampoo so often, their scalp turns tight and itchy? If not, was it just good luck on their side?

When I still lived in California, I tried no-poo. We had well water, and the water quality was way better than what I’d had before. (This is not a high bar. When I was a kid on Long Island, we had to have our pipes “flushed” yearly or so, and periodically had our water chlorine-shocked. We’d get notices about a week beforehand to warn us that our water was about to get gray, gritty, and nasty for a while. When I lived in Delaware, all the water was just… hard. Really hard.)

The trouble is, no-poo turned my hair into sticky, uncombable clumps glued together with a generous deposit of stearic acid. As it turns out, the water had way more minerals than I anticipated. It took a week for me to get things back to normal again.

I don’t know what made me consider doing no-poo again. Curiosity, perhaps. A sensitivity to a lot of shampoos, maybe. A desire to see if it’d make having trichotillomania easier to deal with.

When I experienced problems before, the prevailing advice was to just use distilled water instead of tap. Since a major part of my initial desire to go no-poo was to avoid plastic, this was counterproductive. Sure, it’s less plastic, but less plastic + a less-than-stellar experience wasn’t really a compelling reason to stick with it.

This time around, I made a solution of baking soda and sea salt for cleaning my hair, then a large jar full of one part vinegar to three parts water to rinse. I’ve also:

  • Made a rinse potion out of ginger tea and apple cider vinegar. It felt and smelled nice, but I didn’t notice much of a difference between using that versus tap water and vinegar.
  • Made a rinse potion out of chamomile tea and apple cider vinegar. This was soothing and smelled like apples and bubblegum. Not a huge difference otherwise, though.
  • Added three drops of cedar oil to the rinse potion. This was overkill and I smelled like hamsters for two days.
  • Added a drop of frankincense oil to the rinse potion. This was better.

I don’t want to jinx myself, since it’s only been three weeks, but I’m finally enjoying this. My hair is fluffier and softer than it would be with shampoo alone, and much less weighted down than it gets with shampoo and conditioner. Even my partner commented that my hair had a lot more volume than usual.

(I wanted to provide a before-and-after photo here, but all of my “before” photos are of me in various bandanas and other sundry headwear, so they’re of very limited utility. Whoops.)

The most important thing, I think, is that I didn’t wet my hair before applying the baking soda solution. I also didn’t allow the tap water to touch my hair between cleaning and rinsing. That means that the baking soda was neutralized without coming in contact with the high-mineral tap water, so I didn’t turn my hair into sticky clumps of wax. Once everything was neutralized, I had no problem with giving my hair a rinse or two with cool tap water. No distilled water necessary.

My scalp also feels much better. Like, a lot better.

I’m going to stick with it for as long as it continues to work out as well as it has so far. We’ll see how it goes!

If you want to give it a shot, the entire process goes a bit like this. I don’t really measure anything, so all quantities are estimates:

  1. I toss a handful or two (so about two tablespoons) of plain baking soda into a container filled with approximately a cup and a half of warm tap water. Not all of the baking soda will dissolve, and that’s okay.
  2. I pour this over dry hair. Once my hair is saturated, I thoroughly scrub my scalp and work it through the length of my hair.
  3. Now, without allowing any more tap water to touch my hair, I mix roughly a quarter to a third of a cup of vinegar to a cup and a half of warm tap water.
  4. I pour this over my hair to neutralize and rinse out the baking soda.
  5. If I feel like it’s necessary, I can rinse my hair with cool water at this point. I don’t always, since the scent of the vinegar dissipates pretty quickly.

That’s it! The most important part of not getting a head full of sticky residue seems to be carefully avoiding the addition of any more hard water than strictly necessary. This lets the baking soda handle the emulsification and saponification processes (while not as strong a base as lye, baking soda does produce a low enough pH to react with oil) and be neutralized by the vinegar without producing a ton of residue. Mixing the baking soda in tap water appears to be fine, as long as it’s applied to dry hair. Rinsing with vinegar in tap water is also fine, as long as I haven’t wet my hair with plain tap water beforehand.

Here’s hoping it works for you, too!