Dr. Jordan Conrad Discusses the Psychology of Hair Loss and Insecurity in HuffPost
Although hair loss and male pattern balding has always been an issue, the recent popularization of getting hair transplant surgery has brought thinning hair closer to the center of most men's attention. Hair loss is obviously extraordinarily common among men, affecting roughly half of all men by age 50, and 85% of men at some point in their life time. Despite its prevalence, hair loss can be a source of tremendous embarassement, anxiety, and even depression. The improvement of hair-loss treatments have worsened this trend as they have made it seem as though balding is now a choice. The result is that most men experiencing hair loss try to conceal it in one way or another.
That insecurity is the subject of a new HuffPost article featuring Dr. Jordan Conrad, founder and clinical director of Lexington Park Psychotherapy. In “Men Reveal Why They Held On To Their Combover For So Long — And Then What Changed,” journalist Ash Jurberg speaks with men who maintained combovers for years, along with psychotherapists, relationship experts, barbers, and a hair-restoration surgeon about why something as apparently trivial as a hairstyle can become psychologically important.
The resulting story is only partly about baldness. As Conrad's comments in the article suggest, there is a much richer psychological phenomenon occurring: what happens when we become so invested in concealing something about ourselves that the effort to hide it starts to determine how we live?
When Insecurity Starts Changing Your Behavior
One of the points Conrad makes is that there are significant behavioral consequences of insecurity. A combover might seem like a mere cosmetic decision, but it is the act of maintaining the appearance that creates a constant need to monitor how you are perceived and how you come across.
"Keeping a combover means never sleeping over at a partner's house. It means staying away from pools and carefully avoiding the rain. It means constantly worrying about whether other people see you the way you want to be seen." - Dr. Conrad
This is important because feeling insecure about something does not necessarily constitute a serious problem - almost everyone has aspects of their appearance personality, career, or relationships that they would prefer others to see differently. What matters here is what insecurity makes some people do.
A person who dislikes his thinning hair but otherwise rarely thinks about it is in a very different psychological position from someone who organizes his life around preventing other people from discovering it. For many men, concealing their hair loss means questioning whether they are going to lay their head on a pillow at someone else's house, whether they are going to go out if it rains, when they will tell a prospective partner that they are covering over their hair, and considering carefully their position in photographs.
“Do Other People See Me the Way I Want to Be Seen?”
Conrad's point is that there is a deeper concern underlying some forms of appearance anxiety. The fear is not necessarily just that one is losing one's hair, but that one is less desirable, that one is insufficiently wealthy to get hair transplant, that one is a "loser."
In the article, the hair-restoration surgeon Dr. Anderson tells HuffPost that research has found no straightforward relationship between the objective extent of a person's hair loss and its psychological impact on them - that is, that relatively minor hair loss can nevertheless be deeply upsetting to someone. From a psychotherapeutic perspective, that is not at all surprising. The significance a characteristic holds depends not simply on how noticeable it is, but on what that characteristic means to the person who has it.
The same visible change might signify aging to one person, diminished attractiveness to another, loss of control to a third, and virtually nothing to a fourth. Understanding an insecurity therefore requires more than reassuring someone that the characteristic “isn't that bad.” It requires understanding why it matters to them in the first place.
The Relief of No Longer Having to “Fake It”
Near the conclusion of the HuffPost article, Conrad describes what can happen when men stop attempting to disguise their hair loss.
“When men stop concealing their hair loss, it is often a huge relief,” he says. They no longer have to “fake it” and are “free to live without thinking about how they look and how they are perceived.”
Importantly, acceptance here does not mean deciding that appearance does not matter, nor does it require pretending that losing one's hair feels good. The more significant change is that you don't constantly have to conceal how you look to get people to care about who you are.
Of course, hair loss is only an example of this. Someone may carefully conceal financial problems because they fear their friends will think they are unsuccessful, another may avoid dating until they lose weight, yet a third might feel imposter syndrome and spend enormous amounts of time preparing (and over-preparing) for meetings because making an ordinary mistake feels equivalent to being exposed as incompetent. The point is that even as the content changes, the structure itself remains: there is something about me that I hate or am ashamed of, and I have to conceal it.
Shame and Psychotherapy in NYC
Almost everyone has, at one point in their lives, been told to simply "stop caring what other people think," and just about everyone who has been given that advice has found it unhelpful. Psychotherapy offers something different - instead of forcing yourself to "stop caring" (something that seems impossible and not entirely desirable), a good therapist in NYC will explore why judgment feels threatening, how much of your life has been a performance to throw others off the scent, and whether that performance is getting you where you want to be.
Often what appears as a small insecurity is connected to much larger questions about self-esteem, attractiveness, aging, achievement, rejection, desirability, or and the value of our lives.And sometimes, as the men in the HuffPost article discovered, the greatest relief does not come from becoming better at hiding the thing we fear other people will notice, but from becoming someone who no longer needs to hide it.
