Work Stress May Cause Baldness

Love your hair? Then don't work yourself too hard. At least that's what Maxim says when they found a study that linked working too much to hair loss.

They found in article in the Daily Mail that cites a study from South Korea that says:

Scientists found men who worked more than 52 hours a week lost their hair at twice the speed of those who spent less than 40 hours in the office.

Essentially stress caused by too much work and not enough downtime is the major cause. Of course, some of it's genetics too. But yeah, while stress may not have you literally pulling your hair out. It has your body rebelling against that sweet mess of hair on your head.

Anecdotally I'd agree. I've worked in radio my whole life. And while it's definitely a fun career, there are certain stresses involved, some of which are constant. First, I ran morning shows for years. Getting up as early as 4:00AM and many times also being responsible for the management of the station, it was easy to work over 52 hours a week and sleep five or five and half hours a night.

Somewhere in my radio journey I noticed my great head of wavy hair retreating and surrendering my hair line faster than the French. Not as bad as some, but still kind of a bummer. So yeah, I'd blame it on job stresses. I was lucky though, I look pretty good with a shaved head so that's how I solved the problem.

Is there a solution? Well I guess you could try and find a sweet job. Although my job is sweet and that didn't work. I suppose you could try to convince your HR director to let you take hair preservation days, although I suspect you'd be laughed out of the office at that. My best advice, pray for good genes. Hit up the hair club for men. Or you could just borrow my razor and take hair loss into your own hands.