- Reaction score
- 294
TLDR: Tressless drowned me in negativity about 5 years ago discouraging me from taking action that prevented me from halting and regrowing my hair that spiraled me into major depression. If tressless gave me a realistic view of my options I would of never have had to endure that.
This sub ruined my life, now that might seem like a bold statement but to a degree it did. I'm not talking about now but years ago when I was still a teenager in High School which would've been around 2015. I remember coming to this sub looking for solutions and I was greeted with an overwhelming amount of negativity and cynicism. I was told the only treatments available were these super expensive prescription hair loss medications that cause a whole host of issues from depression to cancer along with a range of physiological health issues. And to top it all off they barely worked that well on top. Looking back it was all a lot of baseless fear mongering and back then I didn't realise how idiotic a lot of people on Reddit are. I notice a lot of people sound like they are informed and correct and it definitely seems that way until you know deeper into the topic than they do and realise they are just blabbering idiots rehashing the same surface level false information or the self appointed Doctor who misinterprets studies to fit their beliefs. (Back then I held Reddit users in high regard and thought Tressless would be some place with all these geniuses coming up with wacky and legitimate cures to hairloss, well I was wrong...)
All in all the issue is that I was given an incredibly skewed and warped view of my options that was biased and uniformed and ultimately that led me to withholding any treatments for hairloss for over another 3 years.
Heavily balding as a teenager and being a NW4.5+ was heavily taxing on me, I was insecure about it in school but it wasn't as bad then. After leaving school I just wore beanies which stopped me from ever getting a job as I was too scared and socially anxious to go outside without my hat on. I never ended up going to university due to not having the funds and my girlfriend of 3 years cheated and broke up with me. I spent the few years after leaving school alone in my room depressed and on welfare which my Mum stole 100% of while I slept 14-16 hours a day. My self-esteem was so extremely low that I was just numbed and didn't care about anything, I was borderline suicidal as I'd never actually kill myself. Obviously this all can't be chalked up to hairloss but losing my hair and my sense of identity was the final nail in the coffin for me.
It seems so trivial when it's written down like this but that's just the simplistics of it. It's more so about cause and effect, it seems stupid but losing my hair changed my entire life for the worst in some sort of domino effect, it was a minor change that had a chain reaction that worsened all aspects of my life. I tried my very best to accept it and move on but I just couldn't. I think the part that hurt the most was that people treated me entirely differently without hair. Girls I thought were nice started treating me more like sh*t and people who I thought were friends started prodding fun at me, even my family was insulting me, hell and then I just accept having no hair and they think it's even worse. Really shows you how superficial people are I guess. It might be hard for some people to understand but please believe me, losing my hair ruined my life it implicitly impacted so many aspects.
Now how does that relate to Tressless? Well because I was given such poor quality and biased information I held off on any treatments in denial I was balding saying "I was born with this hairline". Now if I was actually given a realistic view of my options and side effects I could have easily gone on finasteride when I turned 18, recovered even more hair as it was more recently lost and I wouldn't have had to waste 4 years of my life depressed and f*****g around. All my friends have finished or are finishing up University now, getting jobs and houses and I'm still in the same spot I was years ago due to being socially crippled by balding abnormally for my age and being a relatively feminine male that did not suit bald at all. (people thought I was in my late 20s as a teen)
One day when I was borderline suicidal I had an amazing idea, I had remembered some pictures of girls that had transitioned from male to female and in my head I distinctly remember one of them starting out as a chubby bald male and transitioning to a girl except they had a good amount of natural real hair which got me excited and I thought I was a genius that had just discovered a potential cure to hairloss that I could use. This led me to looking into if any other people had tried this which led me to this website called PerfectHairHealth and an informative article on transition regrowth which also proposed a theory. This is how I got introduced to scalp massages and later microneedling and the exercises via the comments. This website gave me a solid foundation of what hairloss is and how to tackle it in an unbiased way. This is around the time I learnt that finasteride is literally one of those anti-androgenic drugs but it's just limited to the part that primarily causes hairloss via inhibiting 5AR2. It seemed so obvious. Rob never actually supported finasteride, at least not initially but he gave a realistic enough view of things for me to decide that the risk was worth taking. After all I was fully ready to commit to transitioning into a female just to regrow hair. Honestly I'm rather thankful for Rob and his website it was a beacon of hope in all the misery of tressless. I did initially find it concerning that some of his content is paygated but I think that's just his way of getting something back on the side since he does put a lot of time, effort and research into things. It's not perfect but it's an amazing resource and honestly the articles and comments are enough. If you have any questions even he typically responds to every comment or criticism on his articles. I don't want to sound like a shill which is why I've rarely ever mentioned Rob on my hairloss journey but I just want to throw some appreciation his way.
After researching into finasteride I learnt that it wasn't going to cause all these serious and life threatening issues and it doesn't cost thousands of dollars, I quarter generics for like $5-6 a month. Honestly finasteride is an incredibly safe drug relatively and if you're still on the fence yourself I encourage you to look deeply into all the studies of it. It'll probably take you hours and hours but I think you will find the side effects to be very mild and tolerable unless you want to be the manliest of men in which case nothing is quite manlier than being bald. I haven't found any studies with anything seriously concerning, simple anti-depressants have far more side effects and worse ones at that. For a great review and realistic view of the side effects I highly recommend this https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5264352/ If you're lazy just read the conclusion, a lot of the negative studies have biased samples derived from PFS help.
I think a lot of the negative stigma towards finasteride comes from men thinking with their dicks. They're balding so they go online or to a doctor looking for a solution and get prescribed finasteride and then when their seamen starts to become watery they freak the f*** out because their prized possession isn't working the same. When they realise it's finasteride they start pinning all these unrelated issues onto finasteride and they slowly become a hivemind. It's ridiculous, I've seen posts of people using minxoidil saying it gave them errectile dysfunction and gyno or finasteride that gave them heart palpitations and dizziness, side effects that are completely unrelated to the drug their using, really shows you how much people convince themselves. Unless you have a severe hormonal imbalance you can try out finasteride safely without any permanent side effects.
Honestly my experience with finasteride has been great and my only side effect is reduced seamen count but honestly unless you're having sex more than once or twice a day it's irrelevant and even then it barely matters that much in that scenario. Obviously all the people refusing to take finasteride must be having sex 5 times a day and they don't want any ounce of that big dick energy gone.
This went on far too long and I apologise, I cut out massive portions to size it down and I doubt most people will even read all this but I highly encourage you to do your own research. The hairloss community as a whole is a shithole and I hate it! The only worthwhile thing here is the success stories to see what's working for people. If you're on tressless I highly recommend filter by Top then filtering by month/year/all time to find the success stories and being able to discern the legitimate ones. For the most part the main people that hang around these places are the negative ones that didn't regrow their hair. All the people who actually regrew their hair are off enjoying it in the real world.
Honestly nothing is free and finasteride is a double edged sword, it's not for everyone but it's definitely not as bad as a lot of people make it out to be. Health/appearance wise finasteride has been the best decision I've made in my life and I regret not taking it sooner.
This sub ruined my life, now that might seem like a bold statement but to a degree it did. I'm not talking about now but years ago when I was still a teenager in High School which would've been around 2015. I remember coming to this sub looking for solutions and I was greeted with an overwhelming amount of negativity and cynicism. I was told the only treatments available were these super expensive prescription hair loss medications that cause a whole host of issues from depression to cancer along with a range of physiological health issues. And to top it all off they barely worked that well on top. Looking back it was all a lot of baseless fear mongering and back then I didn't realise how idiotic a lot of people on Reddit are. I notice a lot of people sound like they are informed and correct and it definitely seems that way until you know deeper into the topic than they do and realise they are just blabbering idiots rehashing the same surface level false information or the self appointed Doctor who misinterprets studies to fit their beliefs. (Back then I held Reddit users in high regard and thought Tressless would be some place with all these geniuses coming up with wacky and legitimate cures to hairloss, well I was wrong...)
All in all the issue is that I was given an incredibly skewed and warped view of my options that was biased and uniformed and ultimately that led me to withholding any treatments for hairloss for over another 3 years.
Heavily balding as a teenager and being a NW4.5+ was heavily taxing on me, I was insecure about it in school but it wasn't as bad then. After leaving school I just wore beanies which stopped me from ever getting a job as I was too scared and socially anxious to go outside without my hat on. I never ended up going to university due to not having the funds and my girlfriend of 3 years cheated and broke up with me. I spent the few years after leaving school alone in my room depressed and on welfare which my Mum stole 100% of while I slept 14-16 hours a day. My self-esteem was so extremely low that I was just numbed and didn't care about anything, I was borderline suicidal as I'd never actually kill myself. Obviously this all can't be chalked up to hairloss but losing my hair and my sense of identity was the final nail in the coffin for me.
It seems so trivial when it's written down like this but that's just the simplistics of it. It's more so about cause and effect, it seems stupid but losing my hair changed my entire life for the worst in some sort of domino effect, it was a minor change that had a chain reaction that worsened all aspects of my life. I tried my very best to accept it and move on but I just couldn't. I think the part that hurt the most was that people treated me entirely differently without hair. Girls I thought were nice started treating me more like sh*t and people who I thought were friends started prodding fun at me, even my family was insulting me, hell and then I just accept having no hair and they think it's even worse. Really shows you how superficial people are I guess. It might be hard for some people to understand but please believe me, losing my hair ruined my life it implicitly impacted so many aspects.
Now how does that relate to Tressless? Well because I was given such poor quality and biased information I held off on any treatments in denial I was balding saying "I was born with this hairline". Now if I was actually given a realistic view of my options and side effects I could have easily gone on finasteride when I turned 18, recovered even more hair as it was more recently lost and I wouldn't have had to waste 4 years of my life depressed and f*****g around. All my friends have finished or are finishing up University now, getting jobs and houses and I'm still in the same spot I was years ago due to being socially crippled by balding abnormally for my age and being a relatively feminine male that did not suit bald at all. (people thought I was in my late 20s as a teen)
One day when I was borderline suicidal I had an amazing idea, I had remembered some pictures of girls that had transitioned from male to female and in my head I distinctly remember one of them starting out as a chubby bald male and transitioning to a girl except they had a good amount of natural real hair which got me excited and I thought I was a genius that had just discovered a potential cure to hairloss that I could use. This led me to looking into if any other people had tried this which led me to this website called PerfectHairHealth and an informative article on transition regrowth which also proposed a theory. This is how I got introduced to scalp massages and later microneedling and the exercises via the comments. This website gave me a solid foundation of what hairloss is and how to tackle it in an unbiased way. This is around the time I learnt that finasteride is literally one of those anti-androgenic drugs but it's just limited to the part that primarily causes hairloss via inhibiting 5AR2. It seemed so obvious. Rob never actually supported finasteride, at least not initially but he gave a realistic enough view of things for me to decide that the risk was worth taking. After all I was fully ready to commit to transitioning into a female just to regrow hair. Honestly I'm rather thankful for Rob and his website it was a beacon of hope in all the misery of tressless. I did initially find it concerning that some of his content is paygated but I think that's just his way of getting something back on the side since he does put a lot of time, effort and research into things. It's not perfect but it's an amazing resource and honestly the articles and comments are enough. If you have any questions even he typically responds to every comment or criticism on his articles. I don't want to sound like a shill which is why I've rarely ever mentioned Rob on my hairloss journey but I just want to throw some appreciation his way.
After researching into finasteride I learnt that it wasn't going to cause all these serious and life threatening issues and it doesn't cost thousands of dollars, I quarter generics for like $5-6 a month. Honestly finasteride is an incredibly safe drug relatively and if you're still on the fence yourself I encourage you to look deeply into all the studies of it. It'll probably take you hours and hours but I think you will find the side effects to be very mild and tolerable unless you want to be the manliest of men in which case nothing is quite manlier than being bald. I haven't found any studies with anything seriously concerning, simple anti-depressants have far more side effects and worse ones at that. For a great review and realistic view of the side effects I highly recommend this https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5264352/ If you're lazy just read the conclusion, a lot of the negative studies have biased samples derived from PFS help.
I think a lot of the negative stigma towards finasteride comes from men thinking with their dicks. They're balding so they go online or to a doctor looking for a solution and get prescribed finasteride and then when their seamen starts to become watery they freak the f*** out because their prized possession isn't working the same. When they realise it's finasteride they start pinning all these unrelated issues onto finasteride and they slowly become a hivemind. It's ridiculous, I've seen posts of people using minxoidil saying it gave them errectile dysfunction and gyno or finasteride that gave them heart palpitations and dizziness, side effects that are completely unrelated to the drug their using, really shows you how much people convince themselves. Unless you have a severe hormonal imbalance you can try out finasteride safely without any permanent side effects.
Honestly my experience with finasteride has been great and my only side effect is reduced seamen count but honestly unless you're having sex more than once or twice a day it's irrelevant and even then it barely matters that much in that scenario. Obviously all the people refusing to take finasteride must be having sex 5 times a day and they don't want any ounce of that big dick energy gone.
This went on far too long and I apologise, I cut out massive portions to size it down and I doubt most people will even read all this but I highly encourage you to do your own research. The hairloss community as a whole is a shithole and I hate it! The only worthwhile thing here is the success stories to see what's working for people. If you're on tressless I highly recommend filter by Top then filtering by month/year/all time to find the success stories and being able to discern the legitimate ones. For the most part the main people that hang around these places are the negative ones that didn't regrow their hair. All the people who actually regrew their hair are off enjoying it in the real world.
Honestly nothing is free and finasteride is a double edged sword, it's not for everyone but it's definitely not as bad as a lot of people make it out to be. Health/appearance wise finasteride has been the best decision I've made in my life and I regret not taking it sooner.