Episode 135 - Does Having Hair Loss Create More Health Problems?

TRANSCRIPTION

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Alopecia Angel podcast, I'm your host, Johanna Dahlman and today we're going to be talking about does having hair loss create more health problems? In many ways, you would say yes. And in other ways, you would probably say no. It can go both ways. So let me just explain a little bit.

So when I see clients and they come to me with their hair loss, many times we are uncovering other things, other aspects of their health that potentially they already had, you know, maybe they had, or have, let's say PCOS, or maybe they have menopause, or maybe they have, thyroid issues, or maybe they have high cholesterol or other concerns, right? And so maybe that person that comes to me has already health issues. And then we're also uncovering maybe a little bit more, which is adding to the burden of hair loss. So that's one aspect of it, but then there's the other aspect where let's say you have a totally completely quote unquote, healthy, child or adult, and you come to me and you have hair loss, and this is where you think that they were a hundred percent healthy.

Like I thought I was completely healthy when I was diagnosed with alopecia. I didn't understand why, and lo and behold, we're uncovering a bunch of things that were there and were dormant. They were dormant and they needed to be uncovered and it's only now with the uncovering that we're able to not only heal the hair loss, but we're also to really put her back, put her body back into balance, put our mind, body, spirit back into balance. So sometimes you may think that you are 100% healthy and you have no other issue, but hair loss, but I will say that hair loss is contributed because there's something there underlying that needs to be addressed. Hair loss doesn't come just because, right? There's always a reason for it.

And so, going back to the initial question, does having hair loss create more health problems? And I would say for those who are unaware, maybe it does seem this way, but for those who are already knowing that they have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 aspects of health concerns, and then on top of it, they have hair loss, then they get to see that everything resolves at the same time. For those of you who, like me, enter hair loss thinking that you're at your best, thinking that you're at your optimal, thinking, there's a little more digging to do. This is where that guidance and that expert guidance comes from, because I can pick things out and I can review your intake form, which is 11 pages long and really see underneath the hood of what's happening so that we can really target this and get to the bottom of this sooner rather than later.

So that you can start to see the hair growth in less time. And this is key because you don't want to wait because there could be other things going on that potentially have been overlooked. And this is quite easy to do. You know, in today's modern society of the hustle and bustle of, you know, trying to get things done, trying to take care of our families, trying to progress in our lives and do all the things we can overlook health, we can put it on cruise control. That's actually one thing that looking back at my own journey has hindered me, you know, you think that it's on cruise control, and yet it's doing you a disservice.

Or on the other side of it on the flip side, you have other aspects of your health that you didn't think were even part of this equation, that are on cruise control, but then other aspects of it just keep growing and growing and growing and mounting up to the surface and bubbling until then it finally reaches and bubbles over creating this explosion that we call alopecia, which is the medical term for hair loss, not necessarily the autoimmune, but even with androgenetic, even with female pattern baldness, even with scarring, even with different types of hair loss, you know, why is it that we leave things for the worst case scenario? Why is it that we are leaving things until we just can't handle it anymore?

I was out with a friend of mine. We went out to lunch the other day and she has a slew of health problems. She has Hashimoto's, she has just a bunch of things. She doesn't have alopecia, but she has a bunch of other stuff going on in her health. We were talking about her health and we were talking about, you know her projects and her plans and everything and the general consensus is is like we don't do as humans we don't do enough for ourselves until it's dire until we're actually at the end of our rope at the end of our you know edge of coming over and so this is the case that I have seen not just in her but also in many clients where the proactiveness is not there, where many people let the hair loss linger and linger and linger until then they can't withstand it anymore and they just can't fathom looking at themselves in the mirror anymore.

This is actually counterproductive because if we see hair loss that's happening, more hair loss than what we are accustomed to seeing for us over the period of weeks and months, We should start doing something now about it and avoid all these other gimmicks and traps so that we can get back on track faster so that we don't have to get to that end of the rope situation. When we're at the end of the rope, this is where things get a little more dicey, right? They get a little more hectic, there's more things involved, and on top of it, our emotions are at an all time high.

I I can remember when I was on my own journey. And the emotions ran really high because a) I didn't understand. B) There was a lot of factors involved. c) It was a process, it's a process to heal. For many people that can be less than 8 weeks and they can jump start that healing, and in other people there's a little more work to be done. And so this is where, you know, time is of the essence. If we see a situation now, why would we wait for things to get worse? So for example, if you're driving your car and you see the check light engine go off, you wouldn't wait another month or 2 or 3 for your car to break down or for you not to have a car because you need your car to take you to work, to take you to school, to take you to, the gym, to take you to run your errands, to pick up your kids and all these other things, right?

And so we would give it immediate attention. And so many times as humans, we default on our priorities on what we need the most, and many times we just let things sit, right? We just let things sit, we push it underneath the rug and we don't look towards giving the attention that it requires. And so this is a big concern and I wish maybe the mindset would be different that if we had an issue, we look at it immediately because the more immediate, the better it is. Not to say that if you've had hair loss for 40, 50 years, you can't heal and reverse it. Absolutely. You can, but at the same time, wouldn't it have been better if you got it within the first 5 years, instead of having to go through the angst and the anxiety and the depression and the isolation that potentially has happened to you throughout the last 30, 40 years when we could have, you know, fix this in the first year or in the first couple months.

And so this is the mindset shift that I'm trying to enable here, because when we see something that's off, we need to pay attention to it. Our body speaks in so many ways and hair loss is one of them, right? When we have hair loss, something is clearly off. Something is clearly out of balance. So going back to the initial question: If we have hair loss, does this mean we're going to have more health concerns? And I would say yes or no, it depends on the person. Yeah, for many of you, you may uncover a bunch of new things that you didn't know were there. And that's actually a good thing, right? Because we're here to get healthy and to get our hair back. And at the same time, for those of you who already have other health concerns, maybe a second or a third autoimmune disease, or maybe you have, you know, other situations with your health, you already know you already have other concerns plus the added bonus of alopecia. These two can be helped, can be rectified, can be healed, because when we start to heal the body, everything levels up, everything is getting upgraded, everything is improving.

This is the mindset that we need to have, that everything improves once we start tackling things, but the sooner we tackle, the better it is, right? It's kind of like the leak in the roof. The sooner you get to it, the better it is, so that it doesn't destroy the whole roof instead of just one little aspect of it. The same with the car, right? The sooner we focus on that check engine light and we get it fixed or attended to, then the better off we are, because then we'll have a good running car for our errands, jobs, work, school, et cetera.

And so I wanted to answer this question because this is a question that came up here recently with a client, and these are parents of a child who are doing my program and we were talking and they were wondering, you know, does this come up? Do more health concerns come up? And, you know, I told them, it just all depends of the situation. In their case, They could be, you know, uncovering a bunch of other situations that they had no idea about their child, which is a good thing because you want to tackle it now. You definitely want to tackle it now so that they can be on the right path towards healing and recovery a lot sooner.

The other thing I wanted to add to that is that the mindset of the parent is so important for the children, regardless of whether the child understands or comprehends, maybe because the child is very young, or maybe because the child is just oblivious or in a loof, but at the same time, the mindset of the parents is so critical to the shaping and formation and the development of the child. So for example, you know, if one parent thinks: Oh, your alopecia is going to come back. Like, there's nothing to do. Or let's say they have a negative mindset, well, this is where we need to tweak that a little bit because people feed off of energy, people feed off of what they're told.

This is why we've all been, and I include myself, we've all been in that circle of doom and gloom thinking that there was no cure for alopecia, yet we know that there is. And so, now that we know that, now that we're able to heal our alopecia, then we need to stay positive and say: Hey, we are going to heal this and we're going to keep you, you know, healed and reversed and fully abundant with lots of hair for the rest of your life. How do we do that? Well, I show you how in the program, but at the same time, we need to also have that mindset that yes, that this is possible and yes, we can heal. It's just like we can lose weight, just like we can run a marathon, just like we can train to go to the Olympics, just like we can, learn to play the guitar and to anything. We can learn to heal and reverse our alopecia and to keep it that way for the rest of our lives.

And so, for example, in my case, I've been more than 9 years alopecia free and that's even with COVID, even with stressful times, even with, moving country to country and continent to continent, and even with postpartum hair loss, which was in my 40s. And still, I still have all my hair and alopecia never came back. And that's actually another topic for another day. The postpartum factor, not of postpartum hair loss, but what can happen, what can trigger during pregnancy and postpartum for mothers, for women, when they are delivering their babies and the onslaught of autoimmune diseases, which is actually quite high.

And so I'll get into that on another podcast, because that's really, really important for, for you to know, and for you to have that awareness of. I'm receiving a lot of women who are wanting to conceive, wanting to have children, but they also have alopecia, so they're wanting to heal and then get pregnant, which is great. That's a great way of doing things. If you wanted to revert back to some of my podcasts, I have many on what to do for pre pregnancy, and also when you're on that journey of conceiving, because I believe both of them are intertwined. The healthier we are, including the hair growth, the healthier we are, the better off we are for ourselves and also for our children.

If you know my fertility story, I actually got pregnant after I healed alopecia, and I got pregnant on the first try at 40. It was a great pregnancy, no issues, had a beautiful birth and, you know, healthy, 9 pounds, 7 ounce baby, which in kilos, for those of you who listen to me in our abroad kilos is 4 kilos, 400 grams, and that's a big baby. It's almost 10 pounds. And so with that being said, you know, there was no complications, no postpartum hair loss, and, that 5th trimester, as they say, or that 4th trimester, as they say, is so critical to the well being of mom and child, but also family. And so, I will tackle that on another podcast episode.

But, just to revert back. Does having hair loss create more health problems? And I would say no, but if anything, it's uncovering more things that we need to look at. So for example, going back to the car example, if we had the check engine light, maybe the spark plugs need to be changed out, but potentially we're also low on fluids for our car. And so this is something that while you're checking for one thing, the other thing comes up and says: Oh, hey, we also need this. Oh, hey, you're due for maintenance here and there. And so this is key because the more we check on things, the better it is. And the thoroughness of these checks is what leads to our success.

So I hope this has helped you and I'll keep this short and sweet. If you're not on my email list, feel free to subscribe. We have lots of information that we give out on a weekly and monthly basis and we do not spam and we do not sell your information. We hold privacy policies close to the heart because I too don't like to have my information everywhere. You can do so at [email protected] and you can also go to aloepeciaangel.com for more information on our programs, on our free PDFs, and on our free training and resources.

Thank you so much. I look forward to talking to you next time. Take care.