A lot more changes go on in your body during pregnancy than you might imagine. Although all the books on childbirth talk about hormonal changes, mood swings, back aches, and the need to wear low-heeled shoes, one of the things that most manuals neglect to talk about is what happens to your hair during and after pregnancy. It's likely you have no clue about the cycles your hair goes through when you aren't pregnant, which makes it difficult to understand the differences that are evoked following childbirth and what exactly is happening to you.
There are thousands of hair follicles embedded in your scalp. Each one goes through three cycles about 20 times during your life. These cycles are:
1. Anagen - this is the growing phase of a hair. About 80-90% of your follicles are in this phase at any given time. Hair grows continuously during this 3-7 year period at the rate of about a half inch a month.
2. Catagen - following the Anagen period of hair growth, the hair goes through a 2-4 week period when it detaches from the blood supply, the follicle shrinks to about 1/6 of it's original size, and as the new hair starts forming, the bulb of the old hair is pushed upward. Somewhere between 2 and 3% of your hair will be in this stage during any specific period.
3. Telogen - during this 3-month period, 50 - 100 hairs will fall out each day. Hair follicles become weak and thin. Once the hair falls out, a new follicle will grow in its place.
As you can see, some hair loss is to be expected every day of your life. While you are pregnant, however, your hair will experience the cycles differently. During pregnancy, a larger percent of hairs go into the Catagen cycle. They don't fall out, however, because of the increase of hormones in your body. It's easy to see, then, that after pregnancy, when your hormone levels return to normal, all this hair that is in the waiting stage and didn't come out while you were pregnant reaches the Telogen stage and begins to fall out. It generally takes 3-4 months for this to occur before your hair will get back to its normal cycles.
Hair loss after pregnancy is a very normal occurrence, and it's nothing that should cause you undue alarm. After going through its normal processes, your hair should get back to normal within a few months. You can chill now. You aren't going bald!
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