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Stress may be, first and foremost, a mental condition—but we all know that its effects can encompass the physical body, too. If you’ve ever been through a season of intense stress (and surely you have), you know that stress can impact your appetite and your ability to sleep. It can leave you feeling weary and exhausted. It can provoke a headache or an upset stomach. It can even make you more susceptible to sickness and disease.

Growing up, you probably heard your mom or dad tell you about the importance of getting enough vitamins—about how vitamins help you grow up to be big, strong, and healthy. Well, that’s as true in adulthood as it is in childhood. Taking the right vitamins is necessary to keep all the parts of your body functioning as intended. And that includes your hair!

Sadly, many of us don’t quite get the vitamins we need, and the results can be dire. Vitamin D deficiency is especially common. When we don’t get the Vitamin D that we need, it can have a negative impact on our hair follicles, among other things—and that can lead to suboptimal hair health and growth.

Men can lose their hair for any number of reasons. Sometimes, the specific cause is pretty easy to determine; if you’re undergoing chemotherapy, or if you’re taking a medication that’s known to cause hair loss, that eliminates the guesswork. In other cases, though, the cause is tougher to determine—yet doing so is an essential step in deciding on the best course of treatment.

We all know the old saying: You are what you eat. Well, silly though it may sound, there’s actually some truth to it. The nutrients we consume help form the building blocks of our body—and that includes our hair and skin. In a real and direct way, what we eat determines the quality of our skin, our hair, and beyond.

At some point in your life, you may have had an experience where you felt so frustrated or angry that you almost could have pulled your hair out. What you may not realize is that this is an actual disorder. It’s called trichotillomania, and it’s essentially an impulse control disorder. The people who have this condition know that they’re damaging themselves when they twist or even rip their hair out, and yet they cannot stop themselves from doing it anyway.

There are 55 million men in this country who struggle with hair loss—and if you’re not one of them, you may be worried that you could be. Hair loss is something that causes no small amount of anxiety in men, especially those who know that it’s a family trait. If your father lost his hair, there is a good chance that you’ll follow suit—or so the thinking goes.

You’ve probably heard jokes about stress and hair before: How a particularly trying situation can make a person go gray, or how too much anxiety leads to hair loss. But is there actually any truth to these jokes—or is it all a common misconception?