Parenting a child is hard on a good day. Having a child who deals with a challenging body-focused repetitive behavior (BFRB), such as Trichotillomania, can leave even the most skilled parent struggling to know the best way to parent and support their child.

You want to support and guide your child. You want to protect them from anything that can hurt them. You also want to help them overcome their challenges. Research into child mental health tells us that parenting can play a key role in a child’s mental health and ability to cope in healthy ways. But, knowing just how to do that isn’t always clear and you may have more questions than answers. If you find yourself searching for answers, this article is for you.

Avoidance…it’s something we all do. It’s our go-to when we just don’t want to do something. But there’s avoidance of something just unpleasant and then there’s avoidance of emotions that can create distress. In this TrichStop.com webinar, Dr. Vladimir Miletic talks about emotional avoidance and how avoiding difficult emotions and memories may lead to hair pulling.

What Avoidance Is and Why We Do It

Emotional avoidance occurs when a person is unwilling to deal with certain private experiences such as body sensations, emotions, or thoughts and takes steps to alter the form or frequency of these events and the contexts in which they occur. Dr. Miletic frames this behavior as the things a person is willing to do to minimize or change their experience so they don’t have to deal with it.

We use avoidance behaviors all the time. Some are relatively benign. Others, like hair pulling, can have significant, often unintended, consequences. So, the question is, why do we avoid if we know that it causes problems?

BFRBs are not a single disorder but a group of disorders characterized by repetitive behaviors that cause injury to the body. BRFBs include trichotillomania (hair pulling), excoriation (skin picking), onychophagia (nail biting), morsicatio buccarum (cheek biting), and others. While each of these disorders is different in its focus on the body, they do share common trajectories. BFRBs result in varying degrees of physical injury to the body and can markedly impair emotional and social functioning. BFRBs are relatively common and not everyone will have significant problems. However, for those that do, finding treatment that can reduce symptoms and improve their quality of life is a priority and sustained effort.

When it comes to physical health, the benefits of healthy lifestyle habits are well-known. Actions like maintaining a proper diet, exercising, not smoking, and getting enough sleep have been shown to improve many health conditions. What you might not know is that lifestyle habits can also have an effect on mental health. A growing body of evidence has linked healthy lifestyle habits to improvement in conditions like depression, anxiety, and ADHD. Now, research suggests that sleep quality can have a major impact on trichotillomania (TTM).

A new study in the journal Comprehensive Psychiatry looked at the effects of sleep quality on trichotillomania (TTM) and skin-picking disorder (SPD). What they found could be a game-changer for people dealing with body-focused repetitive behaviors.