foraging behaviour and hair pulling?

Which one would you choose?

A basic survival behaviour since the dawn of human existence has been food seeking or foraging.  Humans have long had to make mental calculations about how much time and energy to devote to food seeking.  In those days it was calories rather than money that were the real currency.  If it took you all day to find food that provided only a meagre number of calories then you would not live very long before starvation would set in.  To survive one would have to find food that took less time and effort to find by seeking out a better alternative food - one requiring less time and energy to find and prepare before eating.

So food seeking, food finding and food selecting are behaviours key to who and what we are.  An obvious example is berry picking.  When picking berries one is automatically drawn to pick those which are largest and most ripe.  The choice is simple - the bigger and riper the berry means the more calories they possess.  Efficiency of effort is served by selecting these over smaller and less developed berries.

For anyone who has ever pulled hair to obtain hair roots some of these notes on berry picking should be familiar.  Hairs are selected from certain favoured parts of the scalp where the likelihood of extracting a fatty root is most high.  Commonly this is from the vertex or crown region.  As hairs in a favoured region become depleted the puller will start to pull from new areas.  This again makes sense in the context of food foraging because once one area becomes depleted of food the forager moves on to where berries are more plentiful and can therefore maintain a high rate of return in relation to energy expended. 

It would seem that the same mental algorithms that serve foraging may well serve hair pulling too, suggesting that trichotillomania is a behaviour that utilises key mental processes that normally serve to promote our survival.

For me, hair pulling is a behaviour that is ancient and which can be traced all the way back to the earliest medical records penned by Hippocrates.  It is a behaviour from which hair pullers derive great comfort and involves selecting the 'right' hair - one that will yield a satisfying texture and a healthy fatty root.  The final process of eating the root makes the comparison with food seeking (e.g. berry picking) natural to make.

By seeing a disorder as a distortion of normal behaviour rather than a behaviour that has no relevance or value within the normal repertoire allows us to recognise it as fundamentally human and comprehensible.

Darwinian psychiatry

Charles Darwin - whose theory of evolution has influenced psychology

My approach to self-directed behaviours is largely influenced by Charles Darwin whose theory of evolution focuses on natural selection and sexual selection.  Natural selection relates to how well organisms are adapted to their environment in terms of being able to obtain food, fend off predators, develop immunity to diseases and grow to adulthood.  Sexual selection is how well organisms can attract mates and produce offspring.  The two things are separate but inter-related.

A darwinian approach to medicine aims to see whether strange behaviours or mental states have positive benefits.  For example, having a high temperature is the body's response to fighting off invading viruses - contrary to popular belief which sees the high temperature as caused by the virus. Invading micoorganisms cannot breed as quickly when the body is hotter.  Of course, the danger is that a temperature that goes too high can be life threatening also.  Or take vomiting - it is the body's way of ridding the gut of harmful contents and so has a beneficial function.

Similarly, Darwinian psychiatry aims at understanding the potential benefits of behaviours and mental states commonly viewed as harmful or a problem to be cured.  Let's take hair pulling for our example.  It can be viewed not as an adaptive action (one that promotes growth and well-being) but a maladaptive one.  A maladaptive behaviour is one that is manifested in an unnatural environment (e.g. a cage) and helps the organism cope better with its unnatural environment.  It may help lower stress levels but at the cost of hair or fur loss (i.e. bald patches) - but the point is that it is not all bad.

Viewing seemingly negative behaviours in this way stands the common wisdom on its head.  Rather than being behaviours that are bad for you and damaging, they instead may make you feel better whilst you are engaged in them.  Hair pullers positively enjoy yanking hairs and obtaining roots.  It is only the guilt and shame that follows brings them down.  

Another example is self-harming.  People may cut themselves or scratch at their skin and this is commonly seen as an act of self directed aggression.  But from a Darwinian viewpoint the self-infliction of pain may lead to dopamine release in the brain and from this the self-harmer can feel uplifted and elated.  This is not as contradictory as it may seem.  For thousands of years humans had to cope with injuries without anaesthetic, surgery or doctors.  The body developed mechanisms whereby pain at a certain level either leads to unconsciousness or can lead to endorphins (natural painkillers in the body) being released.  These endorphins are extremely powerful natural drugs and would have helped our ancestors keep moving despite their injuries.

Applying a Darwinian approach to psychology is long overdue and much needed if we are to make real sense of, and truly understand the reason we develop the behaviours we do.   

Regulating emotion via the body

my self-grooming cat

Self-directed behaviours are all about regulating what is going on inside us by manipulating our external physical body.  It happens when normal channels for handling our relationship to our environment are blocked, frustrated or unavailable. 

All animals - and this certainly includes humans too - learn to survive by interacting in a purposeful way with their surroundings.  Take an insect and put it in an empty glass jar and you can soon see how when taken out of its environment it has no way of using its innate abilities to serve its own needs.

People can live in glass jars too.  They can find themselves in sterile surroundings that offer them little or no chance to express themselves, obtain loving responses from others,  finding security or comfort and feeling the way they need to feel to be content in their own skins.

I have written about this topic before.  It is called homeostatis - the way an organism controls its internal state by interacting with its environment.  Animals demonstrate it very clearly.  For example, if not fed at the appointed hour my cat will yelp and cry.  If perhaps I am busy for some reason and it does not get the response it requires (i.e. to be fed) it will eventually quite meowing and start grooming itself e.g. licking its fur.  Unable to successfully manipulate its environment (me) through attachment evoking sounds and unable to stop the feeling of being hungry it is between something of a rock and a hard place.  It can only endure this state of tension for as long as it feels able to exercise some control over its personal destiny.  When its efforts at attracting attention go unheeded for a time the grooming behaviour offers a way of switching off or self-calming until either the situation changes and it is able to try again, or its hunger increases and prompts a renewed attempt to elicit the response it seeks (to be fed).

I should add, I love my cat and do not go out of my way to make it sing for its supper.  But its grooming behaviour is regular enough for this observation to be made.  Humans are similar too.  Observations of people playing with their hair whilst waiting or bored, rubbing their skin or scratching are signs of being in an inbetween state - of aiming to attain an internal state whilst in a environment over which control is limited so that manipulation of the situation in a desirable way is not immediately possible.

This sort of predicament is so common that one might say it reflects the human condition of being in the world.  What interests me is when this situation is prolonged unnaturally and what happens when it is. 

But don't worry, I won't be experimenting on the cat!

More on bad environments

image by JustcallmeBethy

Sometimes environments fail to give a person what they are seeking. Most people adapt to these kinds of conditions if they arrive in them as adults because they already have had prior experience of their needs being met and they are able to manage their needs by seeking fulfillment elsewhere.  Younger persons can cope too with, for example, difficult home lives if they can find some form of sanctuary with relatives (aunts, uncles etc.) or with close friends.  But if the environment being relied upon is all a person has and it fails them the consequences can be terrible.

We have all met people who exude calmness and emotional balance - they are usually the people we would most like to resemble or the ones we envy secretly.  They are people who we wish to be close to so that we can share in the equanimity that they possess.  But in fact, it is not them one should envy necessarily but the system of relations of which they are part - i.e. their environment.

The problem of being brought up in a disturbing environment is that it prevents a person from directly experiencing themselves in relation to a loving other.  There is no response that can be relied upon to allow a confident self-image to be based upon.  Lines of communication may be twisted and direct communication that is open and honest seem impossible without fear of misunderstanding or arousing an unwanted reaction.

Mental problems such as paranoia can develop in such situations, where one may feel of no importance and feel jealousy towards those who are held to be more significant or loved.  In some cases protective delusions are built up to allow a person to feel important.  In schizophrenics the environment may be so distorted they lose any sense of who they are, who others are and what situation they are in.

In incestuous situations the child may experience a real conflict between keeping a symbolic relationship with the parent alive and keeping their own individuality intact.  Confusion stems from the parent relating to the child in two ways - as parent and lover.  Incestuous feelings can be aroused too where a child is not allowed adequate privacy, is smothered and is treated as a 'darling' rather than a son or daughter.

My main interest is in self-directed behaviours.  An environment that does not recognise or respond to the needs of a person risks producing these because the individual will continually be seeking a certain relationship to its world (to be heard, recognised, comforted etc) but be continually knocked back or frustrated.  This continual process can, in young developing children (and animals in captivity), produce behaviours such as hair pulling which reveal that the body has become a source of satisfaction in order to deactivate the behaviours that can find no outlet.

One of the reasons that hair pulling may be so little reported is because for the people who do it it is a very comforting and helpful way of mediating their emotional frustrations.  In short, they feel better doing even if there are the unwanted consequences of bald patches and social embarrassment.