Okay, for the last two days I’ve been shedding more hair than I have ever shed before all at once. It was unbelievable. I towel dried my hair after a shower, and where I would normally see only a couple of hairs on the towel, I have been seeing tens of them. I didn’t count, but it could have been about a hundred or so each time.
It’s true that everyone loses about a hundred or so hair a day on average, but when you see so many in a single towel dry, that means you’re losing WAY more than a hundred hair throughout the day. In fact, for someone suffering from hair loss in the form of male pattern baldness (MPB) or female pattern baldness (FPB), shedding too many hairs in a day is not good, because in the next hair growth cycle (anagen phase), the hair could potentially grow back but weaker than before …
Unless you do something about it.
And this is why I am not panicking and I would advise anyone who is on a solid regimen after having done their research not to worry about a shed like this. This is because sheds are normal when you are on a hair loss treatment plan. For some reason, many people report that their hair loss and growth cycles become more synchronized than that of a non-balding person. In a normal situation (no MPB or FPB) about 90% of your hair is in growth phase, called the anagen phase, while about 10% is resting between growth phases. In a normal scenario the phase of any given hair is relatively random. But many people have reported to me (and in various forums on the Internet) that when they are on a treatment plan for their hair loss, they go through growth spurts, and shedding phases, as if the individual hairs have become more synchronized in their phases than before. It is my belief (through my experiences treating hair loss) that shedding incidents like the one I described above do NOT necessarily mean that your hair situation is getting worse. It could be getting better because the hair that has fallen out may grow back thicker and healthier than when it fell out (sort of like MPB or FPB in reverse!). I have consistently found this to be the case when I have stayed on a treatment regimen for a period of at least 6 months or more. I will go through sheds, followed by growth spurts that seem to ever-so-slightly improve my situation.
At the moment, I am very optimistic because I have seen some new regrowth in front of my hair line in a very short period of time. I think I’ve kicked things into overdrive. I may be wrong, but we shall see within the next year or so. I will be starting new before and after pictures using my hair right now as a base-line to compare against. Time will tell if I am right about this shedding/growth synchronization thing… In the meantime, I’ll just keeping trying to be as consistent as I can be with my treatments.