At a Glance
Trichotillomania is a hair-pulling disorder in which repeated pulling can become difficult to control and may occur consciously or automatically. Triggers can include stress, boredom, concentration and particular hair sensations. Hypnotherapy aims to help people recognise and change habitual responses, manage urges and build confidence, while established treatments such as CBT with habit reversal training should also be considered. Contact CityHypno for hair pulling hypnotherapy services.
How to Stop Pulling Your Hair Out With Hypnotherapy
If you regularly pull out your hair and find it difficult to stop, you may have come across the term trichotillomania, also known as hair pulling disorder. It can involve pulling hair from the scalp, eyebrows, eyelashes or other areas of the body, and it can range from occasional pulling to something that causes noticeable hair loss and takes up a lot of your time and attention.
Some people know exactly when they are doing it. They may search for a particular hair, notice one that feels different or experience a strong urge to pull. Others do it almost automatically while working, reading, watching television or thinking about something else. You can also experience both types of pulling at different times.
What makes it particularly frustrating is that you may genuinely want to stop pulling your hair yet find yourself doing it. You can promise yourself that today will be different, become annoyed with yourself afterwards and still find your hand returning to your hair the next day.
That is because repeated hair pulling can become much more than a conscious choice. Over time, certain feelings, situations or physical sensations can become strongly associated with the behaviour, until the response happens with very little thought. In this guide, explore how hypnotherapy for hair pulling disorder can help you work with these learned, automatic responses and begin developing new ones.
What Hair Pulling Disorder or Trichotillomania Actually Is
Trichotillomania is a condition involving repeated hair pulling that can be difficult to control. It is one of a group of behaviours often called body-focused repetitive behaviours.
It differs from occasionally playing with your hair or pulling at a strand when you feel nervous. With hair-pulling disorder, the behaviour is repeated and may cause thinning, bald patches or damage to the skin. It can also cause a great deal of frustration and self-consciousness, particularly when you feel that you should simply be able to stop.
Some people notice a build-up before pulling. You may become very aware of a particular hair that feels coarse, wiry or out of place and find it difficult to leave it alone. Pulling may then give you a feeling of satisfaction or relief. For others, there is very little conscious decision involved, and they realise only afterwards that they have been pulling.
This automatic element is important when thinking about how to stop pulling your hair out. If you have repeated the same behaviour thousands of times in similar circumstances, your brain has had plenty of practice. Sitting at your desk, feeling stressed or putting your hand to your head may lead into the next part of the behaviour without you having to make a deliberate decision each time.
The good news is that habitual responses are not fixed. Just as the old behaviour has been learnt and reinforced through repetition, you can also practise and strengthen new responses.
Common Triggers and Patterns Behind the Urge to Pull
Hair pulling doesn’t look the same for everyone, so it helps to understand what tends to happen in your case.
Stress and Anxiety
Stress and anxiety can be strong triggers. You may notice yourself pulling more when work is difficult, when you are worried about something or when there is a lot going on in your life. If pulling has provided some release from tension in the past, your mind can begin to associate that feeling of stress with the behaviour.
Boredom
Boredom can trigger it too, particularly when your hands are not occupied. Some people notice much more pulling while watching television, scrolling on their phone or sitting in bed.
Concentration
Concentration is another common time for automatic pulling. You may be reading, working on your laptop, talking on the phone or studying and have no idea your fingers have started searching through your hair because most of your attention is elsewhere.
Intention
For other people, the pulling is much more deliberate. You may search for hairs with a certain texture, run your fingers repeatedly over the same area or feel that you cannot relax until you have removed the particular hair that has caught your attention.
It can therefore be useful to notice where you tend to pull, what you are doing at the time, and whether you usually feel a sensation or urge beforehand. This is not about spending all day monitoring yourself. It is about understanding the route into the behaviour, so we know where to begin changing it.
This is also why general tips to stop pulling hair have their limitations. Keeping your hands occupied might help if you automatically pull while watching television, but it will not necessarily address what is happening for somebody whose pulling is driven by stress or by the urge to find a particular type of hair.
How Hypnotherapy Can Help You Manage the Urge
One reason I find hypnotherapy so interesting for habitual behaviours is that we are not limited to consciously telling ourselves what we already know.
How Hypnosis Can Help to Stop Pulling Hair Out
You probably already know that you would prefer not to pull your hair. You may have told yourself that hundreds of times. The difficulty is getting the automatic part of the behaviour to catch up with that conscious decision.
Managing Habitual Responses
Hypnosis lets us work with those habitual responses more directly. If certain situations have become strongly associated with pulling, we can use hypnosis to begin changing those associations and rehearsing a different response.
For example, if you usually find your fingers moving towards your scalp while you are concentrating at your computer, we can mentally rehearse that same situation with your hands remaining relaxed and occupied elsewhere. If the urge appears when you are lying in bed, we can rehearse being in bed and responding differently. The more the mind practises the new response, the more familiar that alternative can become.
You can think of this as retraining or rewiring a habitual response. It does not mean physically rewiring the brain in one hypnosis session. It means giving your mind repeated experience of a different route through a familiar situation, so that pulling no longer has to be the automatic next step.
Managing the Urges
Hypnotherapy can also be used to change the way you experience the urge itself. An urge can feel very compelling when you are used to acting on it immediately, but it is still an urge rather than an instruction. Through hypnosis, we can practise noticing that feeling without following through with the old behaviour and strengthen the expectation that it will pass.
Managing Triggers
If anxiety, stress or emotional tension tends to increase your pulling, we can work on those areas at the same time. Hypnosis is particularly useful for helping people experience deep relaxation and practise responding more calmly to situations that would normally trigger stress. If you carry less tension around, you may also need less of the old behaviour that became associated with releasing it.
Reinforcing the Belief
There is another important side to the work. After struggling with hair pulling for a long time, you can begin to lose confidence in yourself. Every time you tell yourself to stop pulling hair and then pull again, it can reinforce the belief that you have no control.
Hypnosis gives us the opportunity to challenge that expectation and instill more useful beliefs instead. We can use positive suggestions to strengthen confidence, self-control and trust in your ability to make different choices, while repeatedly rehearsing the person you want to become and how you want to respond.
So when people ask me how to treat hair pulling disorder with hypnotherapy, I do not see the work as simply making someone more aware of their hand. We can work on the whole habitual process, including the triggers, the automatic response, the urge, the stress around it and the beliefs you have developed about yourself. The aim is to make leaving your hair alone feel increasingly normal rather than something you have to fight yourself to achieve.
What to Expect From an Online Hypnotherapy Session
My hypnotherapy sessions take place online, so you can have your sessions from home in a place where you feel comfortable.
We would start by talking about how hair pulling works for you. I would want to know when it tends to happen, where you pull from and whether you normally notice yourself doing it. We might also look at the situations where you rarely or never pull, because those can tell us something useful about what is different at those times.
We would then agree on what you want to change. Your goal might be to stop pulling hair from a particular area, reduce how much you pull while working, stop searching for certain hairs, or simply reach the point where your hair no longer takes up so much of your attention.
What Happens During Hypnosis
During hypnosis, you become deeply relaxed and focused while still being aware of what is happening. You can hear me throughout the session, and you remain in control.
The hypnosis itself is tailored to you rather than using the same generic script for everyone with trichotillomania. We might work on breaking the association between a particular trigger and pulling, mentally rehearsing new responses, changing how you react to an urge or helping your mind register what your hands are doing more quickly.
We can also work on reducing stress, strengthening confidence and changing some of the beliefs that have grown around the problem. If you have spent years thinking you have no control over this behaviour, hypnosis provides an opportunity to begin replacing that expectation with a very different one.
The work does not stop at the end of the session either. You can begin noticing how you respond differently in everyday situations and reinforcing those new responses as they happen. The aim is for the change to become increasingly natural, rather than leaving you permanently trying to police your own hands.
Building Confidence as Your Hair Grows Back
Hair pulling can affect how you feel about yourself as well as the hair itself. If you have visible thinning, bald areas, missing eyelashes or sparse eyebrows, you may become very conscious of whether other people can see them.
You might change your hairstyle, use make-up to disguise an area or avoid situations where you feel people might look closely at you. Some people also become very self-critical, particularly when they cannot understand why they keep doing something they genuinely want to stop.
This is an area where hypnotherapy can be very valuable because we can work directly on confidence and the way you see yourself, rather than treating appearance as something separate from the hair pulling.
Positive suggestions can help strengthen a healthier sense of yourself and reduce the habit of defining yourself by the problem. We can build confidence and self-worth while reinforcing the belief that you can change and are increasingly in control of your responses.
Hair pulling hypnosis can also help you begin imagining and expecting a different future. You can rehearse getting on with your day without constantly thinking about your hair, sitting in situations where you used to pull and simply leaving it alone or feeling comfortable around other people without wondering what they are noticing.
Hair growth itself takes time, so there can be a gap between changing the behaviour and seeing the full physical results. That does not mean nothing is happening. If you are pulling less, leaving certain areas alone or finding that situations which used to trigger the behaviour no longer have the same effect, those changes matter too.
As your behaviour changes and your hair begins to recover, hypnotherapy can help strengthen the confidence that comes from knowing that you have changed something which once felt outside your control.
When It Is Worth Speaking to Your GP Too
If you pull your hair regularly, particularly if it causes significant distress, obvious hair loss or skin damage, it is worth discussing it with your GP. The NHS also advises speaking to a GP if you eat the hair you pull, as swallowed hair can cause medical complications.
Your GP can check for other medical causes of hair loss and discuss other forms of support if you need them. Cognitive behavioural therapy incorporating habit reversal training is a recognised treatment for trichotillomania. Habit reversal work involves identifying the situations in which pulling tends to happen and practising another behaviour instead.
There is a lot of crossover between some of these ideas and the way I use hypnotherapy. Both approaches recognise that simply telling yourself to stop is rarely enough. With hypnosis, however, we can take that work further by using focused mental rehearsal and suggestion to strengthen new automatic responses, while also working on stress, confidence and the way you think about yourself.
If you have been searching for how to stop pulling your hair out, you do not need to spend the rest of your life constantly reminding yourself to keep your hands away from your hair. A behaviour that has become deeply habitual can be worked with.
Hypnotherapy helps us work with the automatic part of the problem, as well as the conscious desire to change it, by weakening old associations, building new responses and developing greater confidence in your ability to leave your hair alone.
Book an online hypnotherapy session directly or get in touch if you have questions.
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