Why Your Hair Is Thinning (And Why It’s Almost Never Just One Thing)

For lots of us we start noticing it in the shower. More strands round the drain than there used to be. Loose hairs in the hands after applying the conditioner. Moving towards the mirror you notice a little less weight in your ponytail and as you run the brush through your hair, you think, hang on.

If you’ve had these moments, you’re not alone. Around 40 per cent of women experience some degree of hair thinning by the age of 50, and the numbers in younger women are climbing fast. Hair loss and thinning are no longer niche concerns – they affect roughly 14.5 million people in the UK, and a whole generation is now thinking about hair health preventatively, not reactively.

Here’s what I’ve learnt as I look into this topic. It’s the bit most of the noisy wellness world gets wrong in my opinion.

Hair thinning is almost never just one thing.

To be clear, I’m not talking about alopecia or any medical form of hair loss – those need proper diagnosis and medical care, and nothing on a blog or in a bottle replaces that. What I’m talking about is the much more common kind: the gradual thinning and shedding a lot of us start to notice in our 30s, 40s and 50s. The kind that creeps in quietly and makes you wonder where it came from.

The answer, usually, is several places at once.

The usual suspects (the ones nobody tells you about)

When I started digging into this properly, what surprised me was how interconnected it all is. Hair is genuinely one of the first places your body raises its hand and tells you something’s off. It’s metabolically expensive to grow, so if your system is stretched thin somewhere else, hair is one of the first things it deprioritises.

One or two of these might sound obvious but they get missed constantly.

Chronic stress. Not “I had a bad week” stress. The low-grade, chronic, always-on kind. Cortisol pushes hair follicles out of their growth phase and into their resting phase prematurely. You won’t necessarily see the shedding for two or three months after the stressful period, which is why so many women are convinced “nothing happened” around the time the shedding started. Something did. It was just twelve weeks ago.

Hormonal shifts. Perimenopause, menopause, post-partum, coming off the pill, thyroid changes. Any time your hormones recalibrate, hair often bears the brunt. Oestrogen in particular is protective of the hair growth cycle, and as it fluctuates and declines, a lot of women notice thinning on the top and at the temples.

Nutrient gaps. This one is huge and rarely properly addressed. Iron, zinc, B vitamins, protein intake, vitamin D. If any of these run low – and they very commonly do, especially in women who menstruate, who eat plant-forward, or who’ve been on restrictive diets – hair is one of the first places it shows up. I had my own bloods done a few years ago and was genuinely shocked at some of the gaps, including a zinc deficiency and an out-of-balance Omega 3 Omega 6 ratio.

Crash diets and rapid weight loss. A hairstylist flagged this to me when she said she can always tell when someone has started ‘on the jabs’ because of how their hair changes. GLP-1 medications like Ozempic or Mounjaro are not the direct cause of hair thinning, but rapid weight loss of any kind puts the body into a stress state, drops calorie and protein intake, and pulls hair follicles into that resting phase I mentioned. The thinning that follows GLP-1 use is extremely common and, importantly, usually reflects underlying nutritional and protein shortfalls rather than the drug itself. If you’re on one of these, your hair is telling you something about how you’re eating while you take it.

Sleep and circadian disruption. Less sexy than the others. Just as real. Poor sleep elevates cortisol, disrupts hormonal rhythm and impairs the repair cycles your body runs overnight – hair included.

Your scalp. We spend so much time thinking about our hair and barely any time thinking about the soil it’s growing out of. Blood flow to the scalp, sebum balance, product build-up and what we’re putting on it, all matter. I switched to water-based organic hair dye years ago precisely because conventional dyes – especially the dark ones with PPD – can be genuinely harsh on the hair and scalp and build up in the body over time.

Over-styling. Heat, tight ponytails, extensions, bleaching, chemical straightening. Nothing in a bottle fixes hair that’s being mechanically and thermally broken. Sometimes the most healing thing is to do less.

You’ll notice none of those exist in isolation. A perimenopausal woman under chronic stress who’s eating low protein because she’s trying to lose weight and getting five hours of sleep has five different things happening at once. Fixing just one of them rarely moves the needle.

What actually helps

I’ll say the thing I often talk about – food matters. A genuinely varied diet with enough protein (it’s almost always not enough for women my age – aim higher than you think), iron-rich foods, oily fish for omega-3s, leafy greens, colourful veg, whole grains, nuts and seeds. That’s the foundation. Nothing you put in a capsule outperforms what you eat three times a day.

Then the less glamorous trio: sleep, stress management and movement. Walking in nature, breathwork, weight training, proper rest. These aren’t hair interventions, they’re whole-body interventions that hair responds to because hair responds to everything.

And alongside all of that, there’s supplementation.

Where supplements fit in

I’m a curious person and I’m always reading. Especially when it comes to nutraceuticals that use something naturally occurring in plants to support the body, rather than pharmaceutical intervention. I find that space genuinely interesting, and I spend a lot of time looking at what’s actually backed by research versus what’s just been dressed up in clever marketing.

One of the ingredients that genuinely got my attention as a nature lover, is a clinically studied extract derived from organic pea shoots. Actual pea shoots – the same plant family you probably have in your fridge! The research suggests it supports the activity of the cells at the base of the hair follicle (dermal papilla), helping shorten the resting phase of the hair cycle and encouraging follicles to move back into active growth. One small study of 21 people (aged between 22 and 63 years old) published in Phytotherapy Research in 2020, saw reduced shedding after around 28 days and visible changes in hair density after about 56 days. Improvements apparently continued beyond that. It’s a small study, but it reflects the fact that biological timelines are more realistic than the ‘miracle results in a week’ claims that we often see.

That pea shoot extract sits at the heart of a supplement called Anavive, and I’ve been involved in helping shape the formula around it. One of the things I’ve learned over the past few years of digging into my own health is that the form of the nutrients in a supplement matters enormously. A lot of cheaper supplements use forms the body can barely absorb – zinc oxide instead of zinc bisglycinate, pyridoxine instead of active P-5-P, harsh ascorbic acid instead of calcium ascorbate. The difference between a nutrient your body can use and one it can’t is the difference between a supplement working and one that’s essentially passing through you.

That drove the creation of the formula which uses the more bioavailable forms throughout, alongside the pea shoot extract, plus ashwagandha that’s been traditionally used for stress resilience for thousands of years, iron and vitamin C for oxygen transport, MSM and L-lysine for the structural side of hair, and a handful of other well-chosen nutrients the body can actually use.

My friend Zoe who runs a hair salon in Manchester has been offering it to some of her clients. The feedback she’s been sharing with me has been genuinely encouraging – and coming from someone who works with hair every day, that means something.

If you’re interested, my followers get a 10% discount on their Anavive orders here.

One more thing

If you’re noticing significant hair changes, please go and see a doctor. Hair thinning can sometimes point to thyroid issues, anaemia, autoimmune activity or other things that need proper investigation, and no supplement replaces a blood test and a proper conversation with a GP or consultant. I’d always recommend getting your bloods done before you start adding things in – that way you actually know what you’re treating.

And for full clarity on the supplementation side: food supplements are intended to supplement the diet, not replace a varied and balanced one or a healthy lifestyle. They are not a substitute for medical advice, and if you’re pregnant, breastfeeding, have suffered from cancer or other medical conditions, on medication or under medical care, you should always speak to your doctor before starting any new supplement.

Hair health is a slow project, not a quick win. It took time for it to thin, it’ll take time for it to recover, and the thing that moves it is addressing several things at once rather than chasing one magic bullet.

Which, now I come to think of it, applies to most things worth doing.

Julia x