Hair hangs on when you pull it, which is why it hurts

Today’s question:

This might be a silly question, but why does it not hurt to pull one hair out of your head and you can do it easily, but when you try to pull six or seven out at one time, you can’t?

Or if you can pull one eyelash out at a time, but not a whole bunch at a time?

Your question isn’t so much silly as it is disturbing.

But since you asked, your hair may feel smooth, but it actually is kind of scaly.

When you tug on it, those scales sort of hook onto your scalp and make it painfully hard to pull it out.

Compulsive hair pulling is known as trichotillomania and is believed to affect about 4 percent of the population.

No one knows for sure what causes it. It may be stress or a genetic thing or just one of the body-compulsive disorders, like excessive nail-biting.

It is considered to be like diabetes, which can be controlled but not cured. If you think this might be your problem you should seek out a qualified therapist for help.

Every day I receive unsolicited advertisements in my email. Often I take action to unsubscribe from those websites, but I am told that unsubscribing can lead to receiving more junk mail, because my email address is sold to other marketers.

Is this true? It is true that unsubscribing tells unscrupulous spammers that your email account is live, which means you’ll just end up getting more.

I find it easiest to simply delete the stuff without opening it, but you do have other options.

Look around on your computer for a spam filter that will automatically move unwanted mail to the junk mailbox.

You can also find a few sites that will handle your unsubscribing problems for little or no cost.