Keep Your Hair On: Understanding Urges to Pick, Pull or Bite

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.