u/Psychological-Ear740

Topics:
Why I share this
Quick intro
How to know if it’s TE at home
Why it happens
How to validate it
What not to do
What to do about stressors:
- Nutrient deficiency & Health Issues
- Caloric Deficit Trigger
- Emotional Stressors

Why I share this:
I keep following this subreddit with different eyes (after shedding ended) and I notice how scary this timeline was for me and it probably is for many. It would be better if great advice wouldn’t get buried under so many scary new stories being uploaded every day. I hope this is helpful to someone.

Quick intro:
My first massive hair loss happened all of a sudden in May 2025 after a shower. Hands, shower sink, floor, full of hair. This continued until 1st week of June 2026 (a full year). I’m 36M, Latino and my family has good hair genetics (no alopecia). Always did sports and in general, ate very well. I didn’t have a major negative event going on in my life before my first shedding but since I can remember I always had high cortisol levels AM/PM and in those months I was going through tough situations but nothing extreme in health nor psychological. What I did do, was go through a very high caloric deficit diet with high protein, and training very heavy (more on this below).

How to know if it’s TE at home?
At a high level you can know it’s TE if the shedding is (1) sudden and massive, (2) it’s widespread to different regions of your head and, (3) if you pull hairs from different regions, a bunch come out in your fingers. With this, it is very likely it is TE. Someone with Androgenetic Alopecia (AGA) will lose hair with time, but not at this rate. If they pull their hair, it won’t come out easily. It will be strong. It will just fall by itself through time.

Why it happens?
Oversimplified: it’s not just high stress. It’s high stress when you are nutrient deficient and or going through an hormonal imbalance. A sudden sickness, a caloric deficit diet, an emotional stressor event are all stress for the body. If your body is going through any of these, you are going to absorbe critical nutrients at a higher rate than normal. And if you’re low on these, your body will find a way to get them. For many body functions you need Vitamin D, Ferritin and Zinc, but these are especially critical for your hair. If you are deficient on these, your body will use what little you have for more important things than your hair, so it will fall. If you’re not deficient on these perhaps there’s something hormonal going on which I’m not an expert on because I didn’t have issues on that area.

How to validate it?
Go to a trichologist doctor or a dermatologist with a specialty in trichology. But be advised: this industry is full of scammers thirsty for your money. Make sure the place looks more like a medical clinic and the professional looks more like a doctor. They will do three things: (1)check your lab results for Vitamin D, Ferritin and Zinc, so bring those before your first consultation, (2) pull your hair in different regions of your head, and (3) check with a trichoscope for scalp health and follicle units, which is just a small clump of hairs, usually 1 to 3 that grow together out of one spot on the scalp, like a mini hair “cluster”, this last tells them whether hair is falling out evenly everywhere (pointing to TE). With these, you should have a good diagnosis. Anything outside of this could be a hormonal imbalance, but I don’t know much about this. My case was an obvious bad relationship between high constant stress and key nutrient deficiency. Finally, if you do have more predisposition to baldness due to genetics, recommendations will go around pills or sprays of finasteride or dutasteride (this one is the best). They slow down the rate of hair loss caused by hormones caused by your genes. But if it’s only TE, you will probably only need oral/spray minoxidil to speed up shedding of hairs that are already programmed to fall so your hair growth can reset. This may take a few rounds of hairs falling (you will see long and short hairs falling. With or without bulbs, perhaps even white ones. Don’t worry about that, it is normal.

Tips: (1) Don’t do surgery and don’t pay for any pills or sprays until you have a diagnosis that makes sense and that you understand. Use your full consultation hour for questions. (2) Corner the doctor to what you need. Say something like you only want a diagnosis and no products, because you’re leaving the country for a year and you read that they are great providing in depth diagnosis which is why you came for. Really, corner them. (3) If a doctor sounds like a salesman, he is. If you feel he checked you poorly and rushed, he is doing it. Corner them to what you need from the start or leave for another one. My doctor recommended me products I could buy in any shop, not from him, great signal.

Do’s and Dont’s

Shedding is good and your hair will come back. Period. It can take 3 months, a year like me, or more. But it will come back. It’ll be more or less noticeable depending on what type of hair you have, or if your TE has stayed intense for a long period, of course scalp will be more visible. But it can all go back to normal if you treat it correctly.

What not to do:
Stop inventing lotions with rosemary or other stuff without your doctor. You may get an infection. Don’t start medicines without your doctor, you might not need what you’re taking and the dose could harm you. Don’t avoid showers. You may get a scalp infection. Again, don’t avoid showers, let all those hair fall. They will fall anyways. In fact go take a long shower, and softly, not pulling, help them slide and fall. Cry if you want, but do it. And do this in every shower. Every 2-3 days. Shedding is good. You need these hairs to fall to allow the new micro baby hairs to take their turn. You won’t be able to see them but they are already trying to push those out. Your hairs are falling with or without showers, but when you postpone those showers, those loose hairs get accumulated entangled with other hairs and that’s why in your next shower you will have a heart attack for the “massive shedding”. You’re just accumulating. Let them fall.

Shedding is good. The faster they fall the faster new hairs take their place. But this will happen if you also do the right things for the causes:

What to do about stressors:

Nutrient deficiency: Get your key nutrient levels back to normal asap. Check your Vitamin D, Ferritin and Zinc. This is the foundation of everything. Most people are chronically deficient on these and they don’t even know how harmful it is for the long term not just for the hair (short term). A health issue can make you deficient of those nutrients during the buildup as well, triggering TE.

Caloric deficit: Check what was wrong with your caloric deficit. If you’re deficient in Vitamin D, Ferritin and Zinc, then your diet is not being very nutritional. Or your body is not handling it well. To fix your TE, I’d say reduce your caloric deficit or even go for a surplus for sometime to correct. Then learn what happened. Maybe you were not eating enough healthy fats? The caloric deficit was too high? Maybe the caloric deficit was happening while having high cortisol or an emotional stressor situation, absorbing your nutrients faster than you thought. Which leads us finally to:

Emotional Stressor:
This is very complex but I’ll share how I’m handling it. I’m still struggling with it but my TE stopped. I’ve had constant high levels of cortisol AM/PM for years (lab tests confirmed). I believe mixing a caloric deficit with my high levels of cortisol is what led me to TE.

What I like to believe has worked for me is understanding that stress will never leave, and it’s all about how I handle stress. If you’re waiting for issues or problems to go, you need to wake up. Life is full of obstacles. The problem is how you learned and made a mental habit to manage them. The sleepless nights, sweats, anxiety, waking up at 3AM is a result of your habits handling your situations unconsciously. I’ve always been shocked about how some people live in the middle of an apocalypse, and still give the energy like they just came from the beach.

Something I learned is that the mind controls the body, but also the body can control the mind. In the same way that a bad thought can make you anxious physically, a calmed body, can also calm your mind. So:

(1) Let your body tell your mind to calm the fudge down. Basically fake calmness with your body till your mind believes it. Next time you are tense: check if you are having shallow breathing. Holding your breath. Tensing muscles somewhere? Next time you feel tense close your eyes and pay attention to these things and regulate them consciously. If you can’t concentrate on that and fall back to your thoughts it’s a clear signal of mental programming/habit.

(2) Make your body behave like it’s relaxed at the beach during your entire waking hours. Not a one hour meditation or a 30 min journaling. Your bad habit is active the entire day unconsciously, so you need to be as conscious as you can during the entire day to keep your body relaxed. Even if your mind is racing in negativity, breath calmly, don’t tense any muscles, walk slowly, look at the sun. It will be hard but to be honest, that’s how you wish your body could feel the entire day. Don’t you? Be consistent the entire day, and do it for weeks. Your body tells your explosive mind that there is no lion around, I’m chilling, so you chill. But habits take time. If you constantly forget, again, it’s a signal that you built a bad mental habit over the years. It won’t make a big difference in 1-2 weeks but it will kick in the more you do it! Be especially self-aware in tense situations.

It may be exhausting to be hyper aware to force your calmness, do it anyways. Kind of ironic, right?

Finally combine this with Magnesium Glycenate (400mg for women/500mg for men). Perhaps take 210mg in the morning and 210mg in the night as a man. This is not for sleep. It’s to calm the nervous system and we are all chronically deficient of this mineral. Keep in mind that if it says: Serving Size: 3 capsules and that is 210mg, it means each pill is actually 70mg you need 6 pills to get to 420mg. Normally is not just one pill. People usually underdose magnesium.

Extra: don’t do weed if you have chronic high cortisol. Cortisol will lead it to the wrong places.

If I missed something I will edit this post and add updates at the end.

My recovery has finally started and I just want to share what I learned and what worked for me. Minimal shedding now, and regrowth is happening. It started May 2025 and the shedding noticeably decreased the last week of May 2026.

For a full year I lost a lot of hair every single day. Pillows, shower floor, my hands every time I touched my head. Hair everywhere in the house, constantly. I used to have very dense curly hair and within a year I went almost flat and thin. Even my forehead hairline receded and I saw zero signs of new growth.

How do you know it’s telogen effluvium?

Pull your hair gently from different areas of your head: crown, top, sides, back. If a bunch comes out easily from pretty much everywhere, that’s a strong sign. It doesn’t concentrate in just one spot, it falls broadly across the whole head. What I was seeing: short, medium, and long hairs, some with a bulb, some without, full color, white, or half-and-half.

Worth mentioning: if it were androgenic alopecia, hair loss tends to be much more gradual and holds better over time. It doesn’t shed in the same aggressive, widespread way TE does. The sheer volume and speed of loss is usually what tells you something systemic is going on.

A mistake I made: I dropped down to washing my hair once a week, thinking I was slowing the fall. It actually made things worse. Don’t do that. If you don’t wash your hair regularly, it’s unhealthy for your scalp, and you’re also keeping loose hairs longer. So when you finally do wash, you see a massive amount falling at once, which is just accumulated hair. You’re not making the loss worse, but you are making your stress a lot worse.

My cosmetic workaround: I didn’t cut my hair for the entire year so whatever remained could cover as much as possible. A metal hair band also helped style it enough to feel decent.

Finding the right doctor:

I saw several dermatologists and trichologists and spent money on products, but honestly trusted no one. A lot of them pushed expensive branded treatments without a real diagnosis. If your gut says “this person is just trying to sell me something,” you’re probably right, especially if they’re selling their own product line.

Eventually in February 2026 I found a trichologist I actually trusted. I told him upfront I wasn’t buying anything or doing any procedures (I used the excuse that I was leaving the country) and that I just wanted a real diagnosis. That framing helped. He examined my scalp properly with a scope and pulled my hair like his little pich 😂, confirmed TE, and when he made recommendations he pointed me to generic options I could find anywhere. Nothing he sold himself.

I also came prepared with lab results for Vitamin D, Zinc, and Ferritin (ferritin is more specific than general iron, get that one). All three were low.

His recommendations:

∙	Address the deficiencies with proper supplementation

∙	2.5mg oral minoxidil, and he warned me to expect even more shedding at first, as loose hairs fall out to make room for new ones

I mentioned I could get oral dutasteride and had a topical minoxidil/dutasteride combo lotion. He said they weren’t really necessary for TE and were expensive, but if I wanted extra reinforcement, go for it. So I added 1 oral dutasteride every 3 days, minoxidil in the morning, and the lotion at night since there’s no need to use both at the same time.

The shedding was bad the entire journey. From February to May 2026 it got even worse before it got better, which is expected with minoxidil. Just prepare yourself for that, it is a long road. On the deficiencies, don’t underestimate how depleted you can be. I was taking 5000 IU of Vitamin D every single day for a year and my levels were still low. It takes longer than you think to actually recover.

The real root: stress and cortisol

I’ve had very high cortisol almost my entire life. Then a series of very difficult situations hit me around the same time, and at 36 my body finally gave in, despite being athletic and eating well most of the time. The real problem was never the situations themselves. It was how I was reacting to them.

I tried everything: meditation, journaling, running. But I’d calm down for an hour and then lose my head for the rest of the day. I needed something that worked around the clock.

Two things actually moved the needle for me.

First, magnesium glycinate, 210mg in the morning and 210mg at night. Not just for sleep, but to keep my nervous system calmer throughout the entire day.

Second, and this one is harder to explain but it’s been the most powerful: I started thinking about how my body feels when I’m completely relaxed, like at the beach. I move slowly, breathe slowly, fall asleep easily, barely react to stimulation. So I asked myself: what if I just kept my body in that state as much as possible, all day?

I became extremely conscious of my breathing and made slow, pleasurable breaths non-negotiable, especially under stress. What I discovered almost immediately was that I was breathing very shallow most of the time, and under tension I was actually holding my breath without realizing it. I also noticed I was constantly tensing my forehead, raising my eyebrows, opening my eyes wide and clenching my jaw.

So for the past two months I’ve been doing those two things: breathing slowly and pleasurably like I’m at the beach, and relaxing every muscle I can, all day long.

The first two weeks felt strange and unsustainable. Now I can’t go back. My sleep improved dramatically, I stopped spiraling at night, and I feel calm most days. I couldn’t calm my mind by thinking my way out of it. So instead I kept my body calm and let it signal my mind to settle down. And it works for me.

I genuinely believe this is one of the main reasons my shedding has reduced significantly. And beyond the hair, I’m discovering after decades what it actually feels like to move through life relaxed. Right now I’m dealing with a job search and a terminally ill family member, and I’m handling it like I never could before.

I hope something here helps you. Happy to answer questions.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​