back to school with bfrb & trichotillomania

First and foremost, we’d like to thank our friends at The TLC Foundation for a great amount of information, tips, & tricks for our body focused repetitive behavior clients! Their newsletters, webinars, and resource lists are so very helpful for us and our trichotillomania community, and we’re grateful to have them as an outlet to better ourselves as well as our clients!

You may be wondering what BFRB is, and that is a body focused repetitive behavior. In our world, we deal with trichotillomania patients daily. Trichotillomania is a disorder that involves recurrent, irresistible urges to pull out body hair. People who have trich have the urge to pull out their hair, usually from their scalp, eyelashes, and eyebrows. Trichotillomania is a type of impulse control disorder. People with these disorders know that they can do damage by acting on the impulses, but they cannot stop themselves.

As you can imagine, having BFRBs can really be impacted by changes or certain activities that can trigger extra stress. Heading back to school certainly falls into the category of stress-related triggers!

“Most children with BFRBs experience some resumption of the behavior during the first quarter of the school year,” says TLC Scientific Advisory Board members.

Teens, college students, and adults with BFRBs may also experience increases in these behaviors as their schedules get busier & continues to fill up and add to the amount of pressure or stressors. TLC has come up with some great ways to cope with the anxieties of starting off a new school year on the right foot!

There are some great tools and resources for coping with BFRB, plus books, finger fidgets, and educational materials to help smooth the transition to a more hectic time of the year. Check out The TLC Foundation website for more information.

There is also a store at their website that you can purchase helpful tools such as Sensory-stimulating pencil grips, pens, and pencils to help kids in class by serving as school-friendly finger fiddles. There are toolkits offered with these items, along with soft and squeezable stress balls, snake bracelets, & spinner rings for the college level or adult level while at work.

We hope that this information will help you or someone you know with BFRBs to tackle the anxieties of back to school & enter this school year with calmness & confidence!

“The difference between school and life? In school, you’re taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you’re given a test that teaches you a lesson.” ~Tom Bodett