Blending science and lived experience, this book offers a compassionate, stigma-busting exploration of body-focused repetitive behaviours (BFRBs) – revealing why they happen, why they bother us, and how understanding them may be the key to healing.
Keep Your Hair On combines personal experience with scientific inquiry to explore the misunderstood world of hair pulling, skin picking and nail biting. These behaviours are fairly common and can cause a lot of distress, but have been largely neglected by medical science, leaving many to suffer in silence.
Neuroscientist Clare Mackay shares her own four-decade struggle with hair pulling, while examining what drives these behaviours and why they can make people feel so bad. Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, animal behaviour, dermatology and lived experience, she challenges the stigma and oversimplified assumptions surrounding BFRBs.
Mackay offers compassionate insights into why these behaviours develop, why they’re so hard to stop, and how shame compounds the struggle. Rather than promoting quick fixes, she encourages understanding over judgement and introduces new avenues for management, including the power of self-compassion. This is not a self-help manual, but it may help – by reframing BFRBs not as signs of personal failure, but as interesting, deeply human behaviours that deserve curiosity, care and connection.
Keep Your Hair On combines personal experience with scientific inquiry to explore the misunderstood world of hair pulling, skin picking and nail biting. These behaviours are fairly common and can cause a lot of distress, but have been largely neglected by medical science, leaving many to suffer in silence.
Neuroscientist Clare Mackay shares her own four-decade struggle with hair pulling, while examining what drives these behaviours and why they can make people feel so bad. Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, animal behaviour, dermatology and lived experience, she challenges the stigma and oversimplified assumptions surrounding BFRBs.
Mackay offers compassionate insights into why these behaviours develop, why they’re so hard to stop, and how shame compounds the struggle. Rather than promoting quick fixes, she encourages understanding over judgement and introduces new avenues for management, including the power of self-compassion. This is not a self-help manual, but it may help – by reframing BFRBs not as signs of personal failure, but as interesting, deeply human behaviours that deserve curiosity, care and connection.
Reviews
Must-read to truly understand BFRBs... Mackay's book is a unique blend of inspirational memoir with vigorous self-exploration and scholarly brilliance resulting in a thorough examination of BFRBs. Highly recommended for mental health researchers and providers, those living with BFRBs and their families, as well as anyone wanting to understand the complexity of these disorders
I highly recommend this book to anyone living with a BFRB, their loved ones, and treatment providers. It is a must-read for everyone in this community, from those with extensive experience to those who have never heard of a BFRB
This book is a must-read for anyone who cares about mental health stigma and what it means to have bodies that are far-from-typical. With a unique voice, Clare Mackay brings together personal and professional experience with a seemingly effortless flair. Packed full of easily-digestible evidence from a range of fields, the book is informative, credible and accessible. Keep Your Hair On offers an essential contribution to how we understand body-focused repetitive behaviours, and Mackay is an unstoppable pioneer of the BFRB community
If you live with a body-focused repetitive behaviour this is a go to... I found Mackay's book the most comprehensive, inclusive and open-minded, relating to BFRBs, that I have read... I will read and re-read this book and will certainly refer to it in any workshops that I plan to deliver for those living with or those loving someone with a body-focused repetitive behaviour
Fantastic. Very readable, blending personal experience with science, resources and so much helpful, practical information
Essential reading for anyone touched by BFRBs.What distinguishes this book is the rare dual lens McKay brings to it. As someone with lived experience of a BFRB and a practicing neuroscientist, she is uniquely positioned to do what few authors can: evaluate the existing research with genuine rigour while never losing sight of the human experience at the centre of it... Keep Your Hair On is the kind of book that stays with you... I highly recommend it to anyone who treats, researches or lives with body-focused repetitive behaviours