Is HTMA Legit? What Your Hair Reveals About Stress, Hormones & Your Story - Episode 335

Welcome And Why We Go Deep Sandy Kruse 0:02 Hi everyone, it's me, Sandy Kruse. Welcome to Sandy K Nutrition Health and Lifestyle Queen. For many years now, I've been a trusted voice for people in midlife and beyond who want a deeper, more honest conversation about wellness. One that includes the physical, the emotional, the mental, and the esoteric.

Most episodes are solo now because I want to bring you thoughtful research, lived experience, and grounded insight without noise or bias. And when I do bring on a guest, it's because their work genuinely adds something meaningful to the conversation. Here we explore the full spectrum of what it means to be well, how the body functions, how the mind heals, how the spirit expands, and how all of these layers shape life lived with clarity and joy. Thanks for being here.

And if this show resonates with you, please follow, rate, review, and share it. It truly helps the message reach more people. Hi everyone, welcome to Sandy K Nutrition Health and Lifestyle Queen. Hair As Story Not Beauty Sandy Kruse 1:36 I think you're gonna love this episode.

It is all about the science and soul of why your hair carries your story. I'm gonna take you through all of it, and I think you're gonna really love this. So today I'm gonna talk about hair. I'm not talking about your shampoo, your split ends, you know, what products you can use to grow your hair, although you're gonna see them everywhere at Costco and everywhere to take biotin.

And listen, there are nutrients that are involved in healthy hair and nails. But that's not what I'm gonna talk about because you can essentially find this anywhere. And that's why I have my podcast, because the topics that I cover are always going to be more unique and they're going to be unbiased, and they're always gonna tie in science and soul, because I truly believe from the bottom of my heart and soul that science cannot explain everything. It is important.

We understand that, but we as humans are not robots, and as everybody who listens to my podcast knows, one person can take something and it works really well for them, but the other person takes it and they go, Oh my god, it did nothing for me. We are just such complex, multi-layered humans, and so that's why this year I also do many more solo episodes because I want to bring you science that I feel so you know, I say it's unbiased, but it's I guess it is biased because it's my opinion, right? However, at the end of my podcast, I'm not selling you something and taking you on a road, providing you all the science and all the literature to sell you that coupon code at the end of my road. Do you see what I'm saying?

And that's you know, a lot of what I do. I'm like, okay, well, I need to be able to bring information to people that is relevant, that takes science into consideration, but also understand that there's always a meaning behind it that's deeper, that's maybe a little bit more spiritual, maybe a little more esoteric. That's really who I am. And I spent years trying to figure out who I am, and damn it, I think I'm closer than I've ever been at this stage and age in my life.

I've been here for six and a half years, and I've been on the Sandy K Nutrition platform for nine years. Follow me wherever you are listening to this podcast, please hit subscribe because I was actually looking at my stats today, and I believe that only 55% of my Apple listeners are actually subscribed, and most of my listeners are from Apple. So I'm gonna ask you in order to support an independent female-led created podcast that's unbiased, hit subscribe wherever you are listening. It just helps me to keep going because I do this all on my own, and I just really appreciate you.

Also, I would love to hear your feedback. Send me email, sandy at sandyknutrition.ca. I'm also a writer, I'm a registered holistic nutritionist, I have multiple certifications in health and wellness, and also in the spirit. That's why I took holistic nutrition in college, because it talks about the body as a whole and how so many things can affect our wellness.

And that is why I wanted to bring this unique topic to you because a lot of times you'll see things in different customs. I'm gonna run through all the customs, I'm not gonna tell you what nutrients to eat, just eat a balanced diet if you want healthy hair, healthy nails. And you know what? You can do an HTMA, a hair trace mineral analysis.

People can order them themselves. I've done quite a few of these in the past, and I'm gonna get into that. So I'm not gonna get into what kind of haircut shoots suits your face shape or split ends, or I'm gonna talk about hair as something far stranger, let's say, and far more intimate than the beauty industry has ever led it to be because your hair is actually a biochemical archive. How many people have you heard it describing?

Heard described, I don't know what's wrong with time. I'm recording this on a Saturday. I usually don't do this on a Saturday. So, how many people have you heard describing hair as a biochemical archive?

So it is a sensory organ wired into your nervous system. Okay, I'm saying organ, it's not really an organ. I'm gonna say it's a sensory object on our bodies. It's also a cultural symbol older than any religion that you can name.

And yes, it's a metaphysical extension of who you are. Some people will say that hair will hold energy. And when I look at the science, the anthropology, the psychology, the metaphysics, side by side, I don't think they're wrong. I think they're describing the same truth from many different doorways.

So that's where I'm gonna take you on this podcast. I'm gonna take you into the hard research, what certain hair testing can actually show you. I'm gonna take you into the neurobiology of the follicle, into the cultural and spiritual traditions that have treated hair as sacred for thousands of years into hair tissue mineral analysis. I'm gonna take into that.

And I'm gonna be honest with you about where the science is really strong and where it's been challenged because I don't do bias on the show. I'm not gonna sell you an HTMA at the end of this. And finally, I'm gonna talk about why cutting your hair can feel like a full body reset and why your body flinches when the wrong person touches or strokes your hair. I don't know about you, but I've had that happen to me before.

I've always had pretty good hair. I have had challenges with my hair and nails that were directly tied to certain things like my thyroid. Thyroid will always be a factor. And also low iron, low ferritin will also be a factor.

And I will say, but for the most part, I've had people touch my hair, not many, not many, because I feel like anybody who goes and touches your hair, other than your partner or your child, I feel that they're crossing a boundary, like that they're, you know, just going and stroking your hair. There's something odd about that. But anyway, that's my gut feel. So if you ever see me, don't touch my hair.

Hair As A Chemical Timeline Sandy Kruse 9:18 Okay. Let's talk about what your hair actually stores. And here's the thing that most people never learn. Once a strand of hair pushes past the follicle and out of your scalp, it becomes metabolically inert.

So it stops changing, could become more split, more damaged. But whatever was circulating in the blood, in your blood at that moment, that segment was formed, gets locked into the keratin and it stays there. So it's not to say that it can't change in terms of other changes. I'm talking about metabolically.

Okay. And because hair grows at a remarkably steady rate, roughly one centimeter a month, that strand becomes a timeline, a ribbon of chemical history that you can read backwards month by month, closest to the scalp being the most recent. This isn't fringe science. This is the exact principle forensic labs and endocrinology researchers rely on.

So hair cortisol concentration, HCC, is one of the most validated long-term stress biomarkers that we have. So remember, cortisol is that hormone that spikes when you're stressed. It's produced in the adrenal glands. Okay, so it's a really important marker.

We all have to have ups and downs of our cortisol. It's very natural. But remember this: a single blood or saliva sample tells you what your cortisol is doing in that 15-minute window. Hair tells you what it's been doing for months.

Fascinating, right? And I've had this done a few times. Whenever you go to get your haircut at your hairdresser, just ask them to cut as close to the scalp in kind of sporadic spaces around your scalp so it doesn't look like you have a big chunk taken out, and you'll never even notice it. Nobody will notice it.

And then what you do is you take the about one inch closest to the scalp and you cut that off, and then you go and send it out to a lab that's an accredited lab. Okay, so the largest analysis on this is Stadler and colleagues published in Psychoneuroendocrinology in 2017, a meta-analysis pulling together 66 studies and more than 10,000 people. Groups living under ongoing chronic stress showed hair cortisol elevated by around 43%. And that's not a soft correlation.

That's your lived stress physically deposited into the strand. And an earlier systemic review, oh, don't ask me, it's called uh Stoffenbeel and colleagues, hope I pronounced it right. It was also in neuropsychoendocrinology in 2013. They tied hair cortisol patterns to stress exposure and mental health across the board.

So when I tell you that your hair remembers the year you barely survived, I mean that in the most literal measurable way possible. Imagine. So just to take an aside here, imagine if I was to like my hair's quite long. If I cut it off and then wanted to sort of measure it centimeter by centimeter, all the way up to my scalp, and I wanted to know what was my cortisol six months ago.

I could probably, I could probably see that in my hair. Pretty cool, huh? So hair is so reliable as a long-term record that it's the gold standard in forensic toxicology. We know that.

Everybody who watches any kind of crime shows, you know that. The definitive review here is by Pragst and Balikova, published in Klinica Chimica Acta in 2006. Their point is simple and profound. It's quite old study, but hair is unique because it stores foreign substances long after they have vanished from the blood.

Nicotine, alcohol biomarkers, medications, drugs of every class. Hair holds a retrospective record that urine and blood simply can't. Think about what that means. So your hair is keeping a diary of everything that has moved through you.

Not just the food and the supplements, but the exposures, the medications, the environment that you've been breathing, most of us have never once considered our own hair as evidence. Well, you know, of course, you have to take this with a grain of salt. If you're looking at my husband who gets his hair cut, what, every three weeks, and he doesn't have a lot of it, it's not gonna matter. But somebody like me, who has quite a bit of hair and pretty long, that matters.

Minerals Metals And Testing Limits Sandy Kruse 14:58 Hair also accumulates minerals and metals: calcium, magnesium, zinc, copper, selenium on the essential side, essential minerals, and toxic elements like mercury, lead, cadmium, and arsenic on the other heavy metals. Mercury in particular is well established. Hair is one of the recognized ways to gauge long-term mercury exposure. Now, because this is exactly the kind of nuance that this show exists for, I'm gonna give you the other side.

Hair sits on the outside of your body for months, it gets washed, colored, exposed to hard water, chlorine, product, air, whatever it is. Some of what lands in a hair test lands from the outside in, not the inside out. So that's called external contamination. And any practitioner who ignores it is kind of doing you a disservice.

So a mineral reading is a signal to interpret in context, not a verdict carved in stone. So hold that thought because it matters enormously when I get into HTMA. So uh hair trace mineral analysis. Because remember, you know, you know how I said you want to ideally take the the uh the hair about one inch closest to the scalp, and before you get it highlighted or colored or anything like that.

So cortisol is not the only hormone that hair captures. Researchers now routine routinely measure cortisone, DHEA, and progesterone in hair alongside cortisol. The same steady timeline principle applied to your endocrine system. The measurement of the sex steroids like testosterone and estradiol in hair is newer, it's more experimental.

So I hold that more loosely, but the core is real. Your hair is quietly carrying a record of your hormonal life as well, not just the not just the cortisol. So when someone says hair holds energy on the purely physical level, they're already right. Hair holds biochemical memory, stress, hormones, exposures, minerals, metals, a chemical autobiography growing out of your own head, my friends.

Now Follicles Touch And Stress Shedding Sandy Kruse 17:44 let's flip it because we've been talking about the shaft, the dead keratinized part. The follicle, the living root, is an entirely different story. It's not inert at all, it's a richly sensory structure wrapped in nerve endings and tied directly to your nervous system. Around every follicle are mechanoreceptors, sensors that fire when the hair is deflected, when something moves it even slightly.

This is why you can feel a single strand shift in a breeze. Why you sense a hand approaching your head before it lands? Your hair extends your sense of touch out past the surface of your skin. It's an antenna in the most literal biological sense.

And even if I go like this and I put my hand, you can't see what I'm doing right now, but I put my hand and just kind of barely touch it, I can feel it all the way to my root. It's plugged straight into your autonomic nervous system, the involuntary protective part of you. So when you're afraid, tiny muscles at the base of each follicle contract and your hair stands up. Goosebumps.

That's not a metaphor, that's a sympathetic nervous system reflex that you share with every mammal that has ever had to survive a threat. There's also a whole class of nerve fibers that are devoted specifically to gentle, effective touch, the slow, tender kind. So the emotional charge you feel when somebody strokes your hair, good or bad, it's not your imagination. Your follicles are wired to register touch as emotion.

Remember that too. It's gonna matter a great deal by the end of this episode. So chronic stress, chronic stress can push more follicles into shedding. That sudden hair loss, two or three months after a shock or an illness has a name.

It's called telogen ethluvium. I hope I pronounced it right, and it's very real. Your hair responds to what your nervous system is going through. It's neurologically expressive and it participates.

Sacred Hair Across Cultures Sandy Kruse 20:23 Let's talk a little bit about cultures. I think this is really cool. Here's what fascinates me. Long before we could measure cortisol in a strand, human beings across the entire planet, cultures that never met, never traded, never shared a language, independently treated hair as identity, as memory, as spiritual extension.

The kind of convergence it's worth paying attention to. When everyone arrives at the same truth separately, I stop calling it a superstition and I start calling it data. Let's start with indigenous traditions. And I say traditions, plural, because there are hundreds of distinct nations, and this was never one belief, but across so many of them, hair is understood as a living extension of the self, an outward growth of your thoughts, your spirit, your connection to your ancestors and to the earth.

Long hair is strength, it's pride, and it's cut only in the heaviest moments grief, mourning, a rupture so total that severing the hair is the only way to mark. And here's how much weight that carries. When colonial governments set out to erase indigenous identity, one of the very first things they did to children. Children in residential and boarding schools was cut their hair.

They understood precisely that to cut a person's hair against their will was to cut them off from who they were. You don't weaponize something unless you know how sacred is it is. Now, Sikhism. And the question people are almost afraid to ask: why the uncut hair?

Why the turban? Uncut hair is one of the five Ks. The five articles of faith, Guru Gobind, Singh, gave the Sikh community in 1699. The principle is simple.

Your hair is how God made you, and to leave it uncut is to accept the divine form you were given, to live in harmony with the natural order instead of constantly editing it. It's devotion you literally cannot take off. And the turban isn't hiding the hair, it's crowning it. Saying, in effect, you are all sovereign, you are all royalty, you are all equal.

So that wrap that you see, it's not concealment, it's a crown worn over the most sacred part of the body in public every single day. Then there's Islam. And the same honest question: Why do many Muslim women cover their hair? The practice grows out of the Quranic principle of modesty, the guidance that a woman draws her covering over herself, okay, so that she is known and honored for who she is rather than consumed for how she looks.

And here is the part that I find fascinating because it's kind of the whole thesis of this episode. A woman's hair is understood as part of her beauty, her adornment, something intimate reserved for her husband and her closest family, not because it's shameful, because it is precious. Covering it is a way of saying, My beauty is mine to give to the people who have earned it. That's that closeness and not to the world by default.

And interpretations vary enormously, woman to woman, culture to culture, scholar to scholar, and many Muslim women experience the head covering as devotion, as identity, as empowerment, as their own free choice. So I'm here to notice that a faith lived by well over a billion people treats hair as intimate territory that you choose who gets to see. It's the same instinct that runs down your spine when the wrong hand reaches for your head. And I've been there.

Girl, don't touch my hair. In ancient Greece and Rome, grief was something you actually cut off your own body. Mourners sheared their hair and laid it on the dead as an offering. In the Iliad, Achilles cuts his hair for the fallen Patroclus.

And it ran the other way too. Young people dedicated the hair of childhood to a god or river when they crossed into adulthood, sacrificing who they had to become to become someone new. Loss and rebirth, both marked at the scalp. So there's a lot, and there's there's a lot more of these customs that are super fascinating.

And in modern psychology, it finds the very same pattern alive in us now. The dramatic haircut after the breakup, the head shaved after the diagnosis, the color change in the middle of an identity shift. You know, there's a whole big movement. They call themselves the Silver Sisters, as soon as you reach menopause, the reinvention, the reclaiming of autonomy.

We reach for our hair at the exact moments we are trying to become someone new. Across every continent, across thousands of years, through faith and grief and slavery and rebirth, hair is the marker of transformation. And it is intimate territory. Every culture that ever lived already knew both halves of what this whole episode is about.

So The Soul Language Of Hair Sandy Kruse 27:33 let me step fully into the soul side of this show now. And I'm going to be clear about what I'm doing while I do it. In the yogic tradition, uncut hair is described as kind of an antenna for prana, for life force. In energy medicine, hair is spoken of as a filament that holds memory.

In various mystical traditions, it is treated as a psychic extension of the person. In archetypal and depth psychology, it's a thread of identity itself. And energetic practitioners will tell you hair holds emotional residue, relationship imprints, trauma signatures, ancestral patterns, the frequency of who you've been. Now, is that measurable in a lab?

No. And I'm not going to pretend it is. But here's what I can't dismiss, and this is why I'm always about science and soul. This interpretation shows up independently across cultures that had no contact with each other.

When something that is consistent across humanity, I don't think we need a lab to prove it, to take it seriously. That's it. So soul always gives me the meaning in a different way. HTMA Pros Cons And Standards Sandy Kruse 29:10 Let's talk about HTMA, hair, tissue, mineral analysis.

I've used it a number of times. I believe in its clinical value, and I'm not gonna sell it to you with one hand while hiding the criticism behind my back. I'm not gonna sell you any of it anyway. I'm just gonna talk about it, and you could talk to your practitioner about it.

The rationale for HTMA is genuinely really good. Hair grows about a centimeter a month. It's metabolically stable once formed. It's painless, it's non-invasive to collect, as I explained, and it stores minerals in consistent ratios that can reflect longer-term patterns than a single blood drop ever could.

Practitioners read those patterns, sodium to potassium, so their ratios, calcium to potassium, calcium to magnesium, as windows into stress psychology, thyroid and adrenal tendencies, blood sugar patterns, mineral balance, and heavy metal burden. An HTMA has been seriously challenged, though, in the mainstream literature. And in 1985, a JAMA paper bluntly titled Commercial Hair Analysis Science or Scam sent identical samples to thirteen commercial labs and got wildly different results. Then there was a follow-up, and they split a single sample across six commercial U.S.

labs and again found inconsistent results and inconsistent reference ranges. Their conclusion was that practitioners shouldn't rely on commercial hair mineral analysis to assess an individual's nutritional status. That study is the number one reason mainstream medicine waves HTMA away. And I'm not going to pretend that it doesn't exist.

So what this is telling me is that it's all about the interpretation. So here's the other half of this truth. And skeptics rarely will quote this. Those studies are decades old.

They predicate the routine use of ICP mass spectrometry, standardized hair washing protocols, and CLIA and CAP accredited laboratories. The standards a Sirius lab uses today. The technology and the quality control have moved a long way since a split sample got mailed to six labs in the 90s. So here's how I actually hold this.

And I think it's a defensible position. I don't treat HTMA as a single number diagnosis. I treat it as a part of a map, a pattern that I would read alongside your symptoms, your history, your blood work, your life. I accounted for, you know, you have to account for external contamination.

But like I said, if you're cutting as close to the scalp versus, like I also mentioned, doing a whole strand, the stuff that's lower down, that's more likely to be contaminated versus the stuff that's very close to the scalp. So HTMA is not magic, but it's also not a scam. And you have to be sure that you're using accredited laps. And that's the facts.

Why A Haircut Feels Like Reset Sandy Kruse 33:07 You have to be careful with, I think that's a fact with everybody. Now I'm going to bring the whole thing together because this is the part that people feel in their bodies and can never quite explain. When you cut your hair and walk out feeling like a different person, you're not being dramatic. Look at everything that just happened in one act.

First, you physically removed a piece of your biochemical history, the cortisol record, the mineral patterns, the exposures, the hormonal imprints of that stretch in your life. A length of it just fell to the floor. Your body keeps recording it, of course, but you removed the archive of who you were. And there's something primal and I'm thinking special about that.

Second, you interrupted an identity loop. Your brain builds your self-image partly around your hair. It's part of the face that you expect to see. Change it, and you disrupt a well-worn neural pathway.

You force your own mind to update the picture of you. Third, you created a visible marker of change, something the mirror now confirms. And your psyche reads that marker the way it's read for 10,000 years. New chapter, right?

And I've seen a few people do this. I actually had one of my friends on Instagram. She's like, I cut my hair. And she cut a lot off.

And I'm like, Oh my God, it looks amazing. And it's like, there's this vibrancy. When uh you guys, I think after this podcast, I'm gonna have to cut my hair. Fourth, here's the fourth.

Um, you performed a ritual, whether you called it that or not. Humans are ritual creatures. Cutting hair is one of the oldest rites of transition that we have. And your nervous system knows the choreography, even when your conscious mind doesn't.

Fifth, when you experience it as a metaphor or as literal energy, you shifted something. People describe feeling lighter, unburdened, released. And I'm not gonna argue anyone out of a feeling that's that consistent. You hear that all the time.

And even I'm gonna stop here for a second. So at age 52, my mother had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and she had to do chemotherapy and radiation. And I remember the day that her hair started to fall out, and these strands were coming out. I was still living at home at that time, and it was really painful to see that because she didn't have a choice, you see, and like she was losing a part of her without having a choice or a voice in what was going on.

So, you know what was that? The whole ritual behind it that made her feel better, that made her feel lighter. My dad. God, my parents are awesome people, by the way.

My dad took a razor and he shaved it off. And you know what? She would wear these cute little turbans and she would wear these cute little scarves, and and you know what? There was something freeing saying, okay, you can make my hair fall out little by little.

It's like the slow, painful thing to watch. Or, you know what? Damn it, I'm gonna shave my head and you ain't gonna have that kind of control over my hair anymore. Anyway, I thought that was a very powerful story because I do believe many of you know someone or who themselves have been through chemotherapy.

It's really upsetting when you see someone's hair falling out. So here's the sixth point, and it might be the deepest one. You reclaimed autonomy. You see, I talked about it before I even I even got to this last point.

It's like the chemotherapy story, and saying, damn it, I'm not gonna wait until you take all my hair away. I'm gonna take it back. I'm taking back my control. Hair is one of the few parts of your body that you can radically, instantly, visibly change entirely on your own terms.

There you go, cancer. There you go, chemotherapy. It was on my mom's own terms, and that's why it felt good when my dad finally shaved it off. Okay, a little shocking, but it felt better than watching it fall out and have no control in a life full of things that we can't control, we can control this, even when you feel so out of control with chemotherapy and cancer.

This is power. That's why it so often happens at the right moment when someone is taking their life back that they change their hair. So when someone tells me I cut my hair and I feel like a new person, I believe them completely. They change their biochemistry, their self-image, their symbolism, and their felt safe sense of energy all in a single afternoon in a chair.

Hair Touch Boundaries And Consent Sandy Kruse 39:03 So let's talk a little bit about who gets to touch your hair. I'm gonna tell you the story. When my son was a toddler, it was by far the most comforting thing for him. He's like one year old.

He would sit on my lap and he would twirl my hair with his fingers. And I always allowed that. And then he'd get his finger caught in my hair. I'd be like, okay.

Uh, but it was very, very comforting and powerful for him. And I allowed to give him that as his mom. Your hair is neurologically wired, it's culturally loaded, it's symbolically intimate, which means when someone touches it, they're stepping into intimate territory. Full stop.

Touching someone's hair is not a small thing. Your body has never treated it as a small thing. Read back to this entire episode, and you'll understand why your skin knows the difference between a touch that you welcomed, like the one from my beautiful son, versus the touch that I didn't. That woman who touched my hair and stroked it.

When another woman touches your hair, remember this isn't your child, your loved one, your partner, your spouse, another woman. And I want you to remember how that made your body feel. There have been times when this boundary has been crossed, and even though I felt it, I never asserted the boundary because, but it made me have that ick feeling. And every cell in my body recoiled when she stroked my hair.

And for a long time, I've told myself that yeah, I'm just being petty, and you know, she was just being whatever, affectionate. But this type of hair stroke, it's not affection, it's actually a move, it's a soft dominance in the costume of warmth. It's a boundary test, a territory grab, fake intimacy from someone claiming a closeness that she was never granted. So go back to my podcast.

It's the female betrayal wound, why women turn on each other and how it shapes us. It's episode 320, and you'll understand more about female relationships, what they can be, and often what they are, and why. And now I understand why my body was doing this, why I was recoiling. My nervous system registered that someone had crossed into intimate territory that she had no right to be in.

And it sounded the alarm exactly the way it's built to. That reaction wasn't small-minded, it was intelligent, it was self-protection running on a circuitry that's older than my manners to say, you know, I I just kind of gently pulled away. So here's what I want you to take from that. When your body recoils at a touch, when something in you says no before your mind can explain it, that's not you being difficult.

That's your nervous system reading a situation faster and more honestly than your politeness will show you. Your hair is intimate territory. You get to decide who's allowed in. And the flinch, the shiver, the pull away.

That's not weakness or paranoia or pettiness. That's actually information. And I want you to trust that. I spent too many years overriding that signal to be polite, and I don't do that anymore.

And I don't want you to either. And I'm gonna just take a pause here because you know, in the 70s we were growing up and we were these everybody, all you my gen X listeners, I know you were all free spirits playing till the, you know, I even played past the lights. Like we would be outside in the street in the park. You know, we were freewheeling.

It was really a beautiful time. Nobody was tracking us, nobody, you know, we had rules, but it was it was beautiful. But what I want to say is that we were always taught to be polite, be polite, be nice, say hi, give them a hug. I'm sure a lot of people realize this, and then.

I change that. Like I I don't let just anyone in my physical space anymore. And I actually find this a little bit interesting when I see people, women, men who are very affectionate, especially when they're drinking. I feel there's some sense of darkness there.

And I don't like it. And I and I feel it crosses a lot of boundaries. So that goes to, you know, hugging, touching, hair, hair stroking, whatever you want to call it. I think as we get older, we get wiser.

And it's like, yeah, no, not hugging that person. Not happening. So let's wrap this Final Answer And Closing Requests Sandy Kruse 44:51 up. So does hair hold energy?

Let me answer it clearly and cleanly on every level. Scientifically, hair holds biochemical memory, cortisol, hormones, minerals, metals, exposures. Forensically, it is a gold standard record of what has moved through you. Neurologically, the follicle is a sensory organ tied straight to your nervous system.

Anthropologically, hair holds identity and meaning across every human culture. Psychologically, it holds your self-image and your emotional imprints. And in the language of soul, it holds your story, your resonance, your residue, your frequency. So, yes, hair absolutely holds energy, not in the mystical sense alone, not in the TikTok version alone, and not in the biochemical sense alone.

In all of it, whole W-H-O-L-E. That's what I always say. Holistic health. Your hair carries your story.

And cutting it is a beautiful reset on every level that there is the measurable ones and the meaningful ones. And whatever you choose to do with your hair, that comes from you. You don't have to listen to a custom or somebody else's thought process. It's all about you.

So that's the episode. If this was meaningful to you, please share it with a friend. Share it with somebody who would find it fascinating. Make sure you're subscribing.

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Thank you so much. I appreciate you all. Very much. Have a great week.

I hope you enjoyed this episode. Be sure to share it with someone you know might benefit. And always remember when you rate, review, subscribe, you help to support my content and help me to keep going and bring these conversations to you each and every week. Join me next week for a new topic, new guest, new exciting conversations to help you live your best life.