Thanks for your question. Hair dye can damage your hair, but it will not cause hair loss. Dying your hair causes protein loss from the hair in tiny amounts, which can make the hair appear thinner, especially if you lighten your hair colour.

Hair dyes use chemicals to bond the colourants to the hair (both internally and externally) and this means the hair must be penetrated by the chemicals. Dying your hair darker is far less damaging than dying it lighter, but will most likely cause some very mild damage, unless you go to a really good hairdresser.

If you are dying your hair darker to cover grey you really don’t need to worry about this. The damage will not be noticeable. In fact the only damage that you would notice would be as a result of combing your hair while it has the dye in, as this might increase protein loss.

As far as hair loss is concerned, colouring your hair does not cause hair loss because the visible hair is already dead. Any hair that you can see (above the skins surface) is dead and is not growing. The only part of the hair that is alive and growing is beneath the skins surface. This is the most important part with regard to hair loss and hair growth.

If the hair bulb is affected by some chemical or hormone in the blood, hair loss can result. And if the hair bulb is not being adequately fed via the bloodstream, hair growth will stop. However dying your hair only affects the hair above the surface of the skin. If you want to increase your hair growth you need to influence the part of the hair that is beneath the skin — and that is how we stop hair loss and promote hair growth.

The fact that your hair is very dull and unhealthy looking tells me that you need to feed it. Providing your body with a massive abundance of the exact nutrients needed for hair growth would be a good start for you.

The best advice I can give you is to intensely feed your hair using the instructions in the nutrition chapter of my eBook. In that chapter you also learn how to improve your hormonal balance by feeding your ‘prostaglandins’, which regulate hormones.

Reducing your DHT levels might also be a good idea. I would recommend having your DHT levels checked by a doctor first though. At your age DHT is less likely to be a problem.

In the eBook I explain how to remove DHT from the scalp and block DHT production in the body. It is a difficult regime to follow though, so you might want to wait until edition 2 of the eBook is released this spring, which is easier to follow and even more effective. Alternatively download edition 1 (current edition) and sign-up in the members area for a free copy of edition 2 (all my edition 1 buyers get a free copy of edition 2) — that way you get both.

In edition 2 I also explain how to clear up problems that cause an itchy scalp — this is touched on in edition 1 but is covered in more detail in edition 2.

The eBook is available to download here.

You also get a free 8 part audio program that helps train your mind to reduce your stress levels. This is useful in stopping stress related hair loss.

There does seem top be a connection between acne and hair loss. The liver is an important piece of both puzzles but what most acne programs and hair loss programs seem to ignore is stress. Stress has a greater impact on liver health, sebum levels, hormonal balance and hair loss than diet or hygiene. What types of people tend to suffer from acne? It tends to be more intelligent people who have good skin hygiene and above average diets but also have minds that think about stresses more, or they have more pressure to succeed in work life.

The more intelligent you are the more able your mind is to postulate on a greater number of possible outcomes to any given scenario in life — whether it be something you did at work today or something you do everyday in life.

The people who were stressing out about work or their social life at school, college or university tend to also be the people who are stressing out at work later in life. But it’s not the stress that causes the acne or hair loss, it’s the way those types of people deal with the stress badly.

Take for example now homeless people. Homeless people have terrible diets and very poor hygiene compared to the average person. Yet they tend to have thick hair. It’s not because they don’t have what we would consider stress in their lives, it’s that they do now react to stressful situations in the same way as more intelligent people do.

Stress is what makes us get up in the morning and go to work. It’s what motivates us to work harder to improve our lives. We worry that we could or should be achieving more. Homeless people however don’t tend to worry like this. Those of them who do are likely not to be homeless for very long.

Less intelligent people worry less about things and as a result tend not to to be effected by the stress and so have better balanced hormones, their livers have fewer inputs to process and their body has a greater supply of nutrients for the hair and skin because stress is not using up the supply.

Stress and worry have an impact on hormonal balance and sebum production. If you react badly to stressors (such as work deadlines, pressure to succeed in life, or even simply jealousy), it has an impact on your hormonal balance and liver. The result is often an increase in sebum on the skin and a decrease in nutrient supply in the body (especially B vitamins and other key nutrients required for the hair and skin).

These problems are easy to deal with temporarily — by massively increasing consumption of the key nutrients, such as essential fatty acids, B vitamins, magnesium, etc and by cleansing the liver. However if you want to solve these problems in the long term you have to treat the root cause — which in some cases is problems in the mind.

How greater intelligence can take you down the wrong road

Because more intelligent people are more able to consider a greater array of outcomes to any given scenario, some people tend to focus more on the potentially negative outcomes than the potentially positive outcomes. The result is that some peoples’ minds get geared towards thinking about possible negative outcomes — in other words they train their minds over many years to worry about things more so than others.

For example: some guy has a presentation at school and he doesn’t like the idea of people analyzing his every move (which is what he does when watching other peoples’ presentations). So he sows the seed of fear into presenting in front of people. Now he might avoid presentations at school. As a result he could develop a fear of talking in front of people. He will have thought about it greatly and formed hypotheses and (perhaps unfounded) conclusions on what people think of him and how he deals with this form of stress.

These hypotheses and conclusions train his mind over many years and in a myriad if interconnected scenarios to worry and react badly to stressors.

The key is to re-train the mind to stay relaxed and focused in stressful situations

We can use the process of developing conclusions about things we experience in life to ‘reprogram’ the mind, so that it reacts positively to stressors instead of negatively. This really is the major missing ingredient in all the hair loss programs and acne programs I’ve researched. It’s extremely important and sad that not enough attention is paid to it.

The truth is that if you are very relaxed yet focused, your muscles are loose and relaxed and your breathing is relaxed and calm you are likely to be very healthy both internally and in appearance.

This is why I’ve dedicated a chapter in my eBook to stress. I’ve included detailed instructions on how to train your mind to stay relaxed and focused and not over worry.

With the eBook you receive a free 8 part subliminal mind training audio program, that can be listened to while you sleep, exercise or relax. The program works by removing negative habits from the mind and gradually replacing them with positive ones. In the same way as we train our minds over many years to form negative conclusions about experiences, my mind training program reprograms the brain to eventually draw positive conclusions about experiences.

There are also instructions on how to cleanse the liver and replenish the body of nutrients required for hair growth and how to normalise sebum levels, increase circulation in the scalp and reduce DHT levels. These are all crucial to stopping hair loss and regrowing hair.