Whether you realize it or not, several relaxed hair bloggers have experienced a setback of some proportion. I recently had one and am currently working to help my hair fully recover.
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Let me tell you, when you’re going through a hair setback it can be very discouraging and you may want to just give up on your hair journey. You may even consider cutting your hair all off and starting over.
The thing to remember though is to stay calm and not immediately react. do anything drastic. For the majority of hair setbacks, you don’t have to go to those types of extremes because with most hair setbacks your hair can fully recover. It will take time and persistence but it can be done.
While recovering from a hair setback can happen, the best way to not have to go through recovery from a hair setback is to never have one. The tricky thing is that there are multiple things that can cause you to have one. Sometimes damage can happen to your hair overnight but other times it slowly sneaks up on you so you don’t really realize it’s happening until it’s gotten worse.
Here are some tips for getting the process started for recovery
Investigate the cause
There are several things that can damage your relaxed hair creating a setback. So the first step is to identify it because your treatment plan should be addressing what is causing the setback.Some of the common ones for relaxed hair include
- Relaxer overprocessing
- Relaxer underprocessing
- Applying relaxer to previously relaxed hair
- Not stretching your relaxers till you have 2 inches of new growth
- Going too long between relaxer touchups so that you experience breakage where your relaxed and natural hair meet.
- Using too much direct heat which can not only damage your hair but also dry it out.
- Over manipulation
- Having a protein/moisture imbalance
- Not using the right hair products
- Health changes
- Not following a regular hair routine
My setback was caused by not having a proper protein moisture balance with my hair. I was adding too much protein to my hair and not enough moisture.
Assess the damage
Knowing how damaged your hair is will help you determine how aggressive your recovery plan should be. It can also help you level set with yourself for how long it could take your hair to fully recover.My setback was protein overload. It caused some serious breakage in certain areas, my hair was constantly dry, I had split ends all over the place, and the texture of my hair was off. All of this indicated that I would have a long road of recovery before me.
Create a recovery plan
Once you’ve identified the cause for your hair setback and assessed the damage it’s time to create a plan for getting your hair back on track.This plan should include changes to your hair regimen such as
Getting rid of the bad
Remove any and all hair products or techniques that contributed to your setback.
Using what works
In addition to removing things from your hair regimen consider adding to your regimen. You may find that there are some hair products or techniques that you abandoned for something new is what was keeping your hair on track and could help it get back on track. Add hair products to your hair regimen that your hair likes and that will help treat the specific damage.
Getting trims
Sometimes the best way to treat the damage is to just trim or cut it away. Depending on what the damage is keeping the damaged hair around could do more harm than good.
Being gentle
Treating your hair more gently by using minimal to no heat and doing more protective styling and low manipulation styles
Having patience
This is key. It’s what will get you through this setback and help you get your hair back to normal. A lot of times the setback didn’t happen overnight so we shouldn’t expect the treatment to fix everything overnight.
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