Experts recommend controlling stress, improving sleep quality, eating antioxidant foods, avoiding sugar, and alternating hot and cold showers to help 'reverse' gray hair.
Gray hair is one of the signs of aging. Professor David Sinclair of Harvard University, a famous scholar specializing in genetics, anti-aging, and treatment of age-related diseases, has proposed three core strategies to reverse gray hair, including:
Control stress and high-quality sleep
Studies show that people who are under a lot of stress will have gray hair three times faster than normal people. When the stress hormone cortisol increases, it freezes the pigment cells in the hair follicles. However, after the subject's stress level decreases, new hair will grow back black.
Daily deep breathing exercises, 10 minutes of abdominal breathing a day, can reduce cortisol levels. You can try the "4-7-8 breathing method", inhale for 4 seconds, hold your breath for 7 seconds, and exhale for 8 seconds.
Exercise is also a good way to relieve stress. Doing yoga or walking for 30 minutes can release endorphins to restart hair follicles. In addition, pay attention to sleep recovery and ensure 7 hours of quality sleep. Melatonin secretion at night can repair damage to pigment cells.
Three ways to restore gray hair without dyeing
Eat antioxidant foods and avoid sugar.
Try to supplement nutrients for hair through diet. Vitamin D3 and B12 are important nutrients for hair. Expose your hair to the sun for 15 minutes a day and eat deep-sea fish more than twice a week to activate melanin production.
Antioxidants are also important. For example, eat plenty of blueberries, nuts, and spinach because blueberries are rich in anthocyanins and vitamin C, which play an important role in anti-oxidation. Nuts are rich in vitamin E, and spinach is rich in iron and copper, which can help build a protective network for hair follicles.
In addition to restoring gray hair, practice eliminating sugar from your diet and controlling the amount of ultra-processed foods. Sugary and ultra-processed foods will speed up the oxidation process, making gray hair worse. Professor Sinclair also recommends quitting smoking and drinking alcohol because nicotine constricts blood vessels and alcohol causes zinc loss, which is a catalyst for gray hair.
You can try intermittent fasting 16:8 (eating only for 8 hours a day and not eating foods with calories for the remaining 16 hours). However, you can drink water, unsweetened tea, coffee, and other zero-calorie foods. This method can significantly reduce inflammatory factors in the body. Experiments have found that when systemic inflammation is reduced, the rate of gray hair recovery can increase to 40%.
Alternating hot and cold shampoos stimulates the scalp.
Gently clean the scalp with a weakly acidic shampoo with a pH of about 5.5 to avoid damaging the scalp's protective barrier. You can try washing your hair with hot and cold water alternately to stimulate blood circulation in the scalp and increase the oxygen supply to the hair follicles by 25%. It has a certain effect on turning white hair into black hair.
Pay attention to sun protection for your hair, because ultraviolet rays can destroy melanin in your hair. In addition, massaging the scalp (the hairline and crown in a circular motion) and brushing your hair more often for three minutes a day can promote the expansion of capillaries.
(According to Aboluowang)