Amy Schumer Hid Her Hair Pulling for Years and Here’s Why So Many People With BFRBs Still Go Undiagnosed
Aneela Idnani is a lived-experience expert in Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors (BFRBs). As co-founder of HabitAware, a TIME Magazine “Best Invention,” she creates innovative solutions for mental health recovery & behavior change. Aneela is also an author, TEDx & keynote speaker. Aneela knows that when we lead with love, we find peace & purpose.
When Amy Schumer revealed publicly that she had lived with trichotillomania since childhood, including wearing a wig to school after pulling out so much of her hair, her story sounded painfully familiar to me. She spoke about carrying deep shame around the condition and ultimately choosing to include it in her television series Life & Beth because she no longer wanted to keep it a secret.
I kept the same secret for more than two decades.
I started pulling out my eyebrows and eyelashes when I was a tween. I didn't know why I did it. I just knew that after a long day of carrying anxiety I couldn't yet name, pulling somehow felt good. I thought it was a weird bad habit, so I did what many people who don’t know they have a Body-Focused Repetitive Behavior (BFRB) learn to do incredibly well: I hid it. I filled in my missing eyebrows with black eye pencil, avoided swimming and eye contact, and became terrified someone would notice that something about me was different.
It wasn't until my twenties that I finally typed “Why do I pull out my hair?” into the internet and discovered a word that changed my life: trichotillomania.
There was a name for what I did. Even more importantly, I wasn't the only person doing it.
Today, after turning that lived experience into my life's work and co-founding HabitAware, which creates awareness tools and recovery resources for people with BFRBs, I've spent years connecting with people around the world who pull their hair, pick their skin, bite their nails, and engage in other BFRBs. Again and again, I hear versions of the same story: I thought I was the only one. I thought it was just a bad habit. I thought I lacked willpower. I thought something was wrong with me.
So how can someone live with a mental health condition for years, or decades, without realizing they have one?
Here are five of the biggest reasons BFRBs continue to go undiagnosed.
1. We've been taught they're "just bad habits"
Most of us didn't grow up hearing words like trichotillomania or dermatillomania. Instead, we heard, "Stop pulling." "Quit biting your nails." "Leave your skin alone." "Why can't you just stop?"
That language matters because it shapes the way we understand the behavior and, eventually, ourselves. If everyone around you believes you're doing something because of a lack of self-control, you start believing it too. You don't think to tell a doctor or therapist. A parent may respond with consequences or rewards. A friend might tell you to sit on your hands. Every time you try to stop and can't, the shame gets a little louder.
But BFRBs aren't simply failures of willpower. These repetitive self-grooming behaviors can become deeply ingrained ways our brains respond to physical and emotional states. For me, pulling could happen when I was anxious, bored, tired, or deeply focused. Sometimes I wouldn't even realize my hand had moved toward my eyebrow until it was too late.
That is why "just stop" never helped me, or anyone else in the BFRB community.
If anything, trying harder without understanding what was happening made me feel worse when I inevitably pulled again. I was failing at stopping because I didn't yet understand what I was trying to stop.
2. Shame makes us incredibly good at hiding
Amy Schumer has spoken about the shame she carried around trichotillomania. I know that shame intimately.
For years, I had systems for making sure no one saw what I was doing. I drew on my eyebrows every morning. I worried about getting my face wet. I avoided situations where someone might look too closely at my eyes. Eventually, hiding became almost as automatic as pulling itself.
This happens across the BFRB community. People use wigs, hats, makeup, false eyelashes, long sleeves, bandages, hairstyles, and countless other strategies to conceal the physical evidence. We can become masters of camouflage because we are terrified of someone discovering our secret.
The problem is that it's difficult for someone to help you with something they don't know is happening.
I remember finally telling a therapist that I pulled out my eyebrows and eyelashes. Her response was, "Let's talk about your father."
My father's illness and death absolutely shaped my life and deserved attention. But so did the behavior I had finally gathered the courage to reveal. That experience reinforced something I had already spent years believing: maybe this wasn't something worth talking about.
Today I believe the opposite. It's the secret that makes us sick. When we replace secrecy with conversation, we begin replacing shame with understanding. Understanding is where change can finally begin.
3. Many healthcare professionals aren't trained to recognize BFRBs
I don't share my experience with that therapist to blame her. I share it because it illustrates a larger problem: awareness and understanding must exist before a diagnosis can happen.
A person might see a dermatologist about damage to their skin without mentioning the picking that caused it. A child may see a pediatrician while carefully hiding a bald spot. An adult might tell a therapist they're anxious but never mention that they spend hours searching their scalp for the "right" hair to pull.
Even when someone does disclose the behavior, not every healthcare professional has enough familiarity with BFRBs to recognize what they're seeing or know where to direct the person for specialized support.
This creates a painful loop of silence. The person living with the BFRB assumes the professional would bring it up if it were important. The professional may not know to ask. The behavior continues, and so does the shame surrounding it.
I want to see BFRBs become as recognizable in our cultural vocabulary as OCD, ADHD, anxiety, and depression. Not because I want people collecting more labels, but because a name can be incredibly powerful when you've spent years believing you're the only person in the world doing this.
Knowing the name trichotillomania didn't magically stop my hair pulling. But it gave me a place to start searching, and ultimately the space to create solutions for myself and hundreds of thousands of others around the world through our work at HabitAware.
4. We don't realize how many behaviors belong to the BFRB family
One reason BFRBs can be so difficult to recognize is that they don't all look the same.
Hair pulling is different from skin picking. Skin picking looks different from nail biting. Someone may bite the inside of their cheeks or lips. Someone else may pick at their scalp. A person can move between behaviors at different stages of the day, or their lifetime.
Looking back at my own childhood, I can see a pattern that I couldn't possibly have understood then. I sucked my thumb. I twirled my hair. I bit the inside of my cheeks. Eventually, I pulled out my pubic hairs and then my head hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes. At the time, each behavior seemed like a separate quirk. With the benefit of awareness, I can now see the threads binding them: anxiety, stress, tiredness, boredom, concentration.
My hands were searching, not just for a hair to pull, but for the sensation that came with it: Comfort. Sensory stimulation. Soothing. Regulation. Relief.
That's one of the reasons I care so deeply about the term Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors. It gives us a way to see the forest instead of treating every tree like an isolated problem.
When parents, clinicians, and individuals understand that these behaviors can be connected, we have a much better chance of recognizing patterns earlier and responding with curiosity instead of criticism.
5. We keep trying to stop the behavior instead of understanding why it's happening
This may be the biggest shift in how I understand my own recovery. For years, my goal was simple: Stop pulling. I would make promises to myself. I would try harder. I would get frustrated. Every time I pulled again, I interpreted it as failure.
Eventually, I realized I was asking the wrong question. Instead of asking, "How do I make myself stop?" I began asking, "What do I need?"
What was happening before my hand moved toward my eyebrow? Was I anxious? Bored? Tired? Deep in thought? Was I looking for stimulation? Soothing? Relief? What was pulling doing for me in that moment?
This is a distinction I think is incredibly important: BFRBs serve a purpose, but they don't serve us well.
That doesn't mean we simply accept the damage they can cause. It means we stop treating ourselves as the enemy and start getting curious about the behavior. Once we understand the need, we can begin finding healthier ways to meet it.
That understanding became foundational to the Love, Strength & Awareness approach I developed through my own recovery and my work at HabitAware. Awareness helps us notice what is happening. Strength is what we build as we practice pausing and noticing. Love means choosing a different response that actually meets our needs, and love changes how we talk to ourselves in that moment.
For me, recovery didn't come from fighting myself harder. It came from finally learning how to listen to and love myself.
The more we talk about BFRBs, the sooner someone recognizes themselves
When someone with a platform like Amy Schumer says the word “trichotillomania,” millions of people hear it. Somewhere, someone who has been secretly pulling their hair hears a celebrity describe something they thought only they did. A parent sees their child's behavior differently. A friend realizes that "just stop" probably isn't helpful. Maybe even a healthcare professional recognizes something in a patient they saw last week. That is the power of awareness.
It's also one of the reasons I chose to tell my full story in my memoir, Aneela, Where Are Your Eyebrows? I spent more than twenty years hiding my trichotillomania before that secret eventually became the catalyst for my recovery, my work with HabitAware, and a purpose I never could have imagined when I was the kid quietly drawing her eyebrows back on.
I can't go back and give that younger version of me the words trichotillomania or Body-Focused Repetitive Behavior.
But I can keep saying them loudly enough that hopefully the next kid doesn't have to spend twenty years believing they're the only one.
Because you can't get the right diagnosis for something no one recognizes. Awareness opens the door to understanding, diagnosis, and ultimately recovery.
Read more from Aneela Idnani
Aneela Idnani, Mental Health Founder & Advocate
Aneela Idnani is a lived-experience expert in Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors (BFRBs). As co-founder of HabitAware, a TIME Magazine Best Invention backed by NIH research, she creates innovative solutions for mental health recovery and behavior change. She is also an author, TEDx speaker, and Certified Peer Support Specialist, using her voice to drive change and mental health equity. Through storytelling and advocacy, Aneela empowers others to break free from shame and build self-awareness. She believes that when we lead with "Love, Strength and Awareness," we create space for growth. By turning pain into purpose, Aneela helps others find peace and freedom.
