You’re not going bald overnight. You’re going bald one ignored morning at a time.

In 2018 I moved from my hometown to Bangalore for an IT job. I’d always had thick hair, the kind relatives bring up at weddings. The new life was dinner at 11pm out of a plastic container and sleep whenever the laptop closed. Somewhere in that first year, hair started turning up on the pillow.

I didn’t panic, and I think that’s where a lot of people are right now. Thick hair gives you a buffer. You can lose a surprising amount and still look normal, so you blame the season, the water, work. I did that for about three years. Then one night, under the light in the office bathroom, I could see my scalp.

My first move was castor oil, because the internet is unanimous about castor oil. What nobody asked was whether I had dandruff. I did. So for months I was putting a thick, heavy oil on a scalp that was already irritated, every single night, and wondering why the shedding was getting worse.

Eventually I did the sensible thing and saw a doctor. The treatment I was prescribed worked, and I want to be fair about that. Over a few months the fall slowed down. Then I stopped using it, and within weeks it was back, worse than before. The treatment had done its job. I just hadn’t touched a single one of the reasons my hair was leaving: the 11pm dinners, ten hours a day in a chair, and a level of stress I’d stopped even noticing.

So I stopped buying things and started reading. Research papers, dermatology guidance, and a lot of conversations with people who’d actually kept their hair, rather than people selling something for it. The same few things kept coming up, and none of them come in a bottle.

Your body treats hair as optional. When you’re under-slept, under-fed and running on stress, it’s one of the first things to go, months before you notice. The hair fall was the receipt.

So I wrote down the unglamorous version: what to eat and when, how to treat a scalp properly, what to stop doing, how to sleep and move, and how long to give it before judging, which is longer than most people give anything. I followed it myself, and this time the change stuck. My friends noticed before I did. One asked for a copy. Then his friend. A few people followed it for six months and sent me their photos. Two of them are below.