stop obsessively yanking out my eyebrows when I'm stressed

Started doing this when i was around 13. I think it was the fault of a game called championship manager in which you manage a football/soccer team. I then continued to do it when ever i was kinda stressed. especially when sitting at my computer doing my assignments.
i try to play with them more now but this makes them fall out. its not noticeable i have loads of eybrow hair just annoying

Started pulling when I was 13, felt powerless over my urges till I went to rehab and through medication and some therapy mindfulness exercises I was able to reduce my pulling to where it wasn’t noticeable.

just shaved my head because it was getting bad again.
no caffeine that will almost always guarantee me having patchy eyebrows and eyelashes the next day….
the only way pretty much is as soon as you notice you’re pulling, or searching for hairs…no excuses, no “i’m just gonna pluck the ones that curl or face this way” stop…put glue on your hands and peel it off, get your hair wet, rubiks cube, whatever…..

I started out as a bullied teen, I believe that was the start of it all anyway. I used to play with my hair first, obsessively playing with the static, the sharp ends of each hair… not pulling them out, just runningmy fingers through it constantly. I’m now 41… since age 14 it changed, I started playing with my eyebrows. Same thing… running my fingers along them until I feel one that feels different to the others, then I try and pull it out. I tweeze the heck out of my eyebrows anyway… trying ti eradicate any that have a broken end, only the finest eyebrows for me, how STUPID?

I am male and have thick bushy eyebrows, but that’s not the reason, the reasons are exactly like everyone above, stress, anxiety… often I don’t even know I’m doing it. The only time I am sure of not doing it is during sex or doing pushups when I’m resting on my hands! watching movies or TV is worst for me. I’ve tried those stress things, little toys for your hands to keep them busy. I actually managed not to do it for a while but it’s back with a vengeance right now. I can be very happy and still doing it, a dreadful habit. Some parts are now very thin… I just can’t stop it. I can’t imagine how drugs could help this, or that the drugs wouldn’t have side effects worse than a few missing eyebrows. Makes me look stupid while I do it, I know that.

Just for background and the search for commonalities, I’m a business owner, creative type… musician, writer etc. Very extrovert, great with people, funny, very very outgoing in every way. not a nervous person per se, but prone to panic attacks over health issues or fear or pain/death/illness. Also scared of heights and flying. Not a big drinker, don’t smoke, no other habits at all.

It’s the one thing in my life I would change about myself if I could. I don’t have any tools to deal with it… and I can’t think for a second a pill could do it.

VERY pleased to have found some fellow sufferers, but how the heck did we all end up with this issue, how is it so common and the instances of it so familiar? Even now I had to stop typing to straighten them!!

I’m sure we’d have been drowned as witches back in the day!

I’m a guy and I’ve had this problem for years. I was able to curb it somewhat by not pulling the hair out but just playing with it. I’ll still pull out about 3 hairs a day though. It was worse when I was younger. I’d pull out entire holes! I have no clue why I’m obsessed with doing this…O_O

How is everyone doing with this? My doc put me on Luvox (anti-OCD med) to help get this in control. So far i haven’t noticed a difference. I’m not saying that drugs fix everything and I was hesitant to try, but I’ve been suffering with this for years, and I’m ready to try anything now.

I started in my senior year of college when I was under a great deal of stress and had to read a lot. Now I seem to do it when I’m a little anxious and also when I’m bored, but have some extra energy. I hate it so much. Sometimes, if I’m home and not going out, I’ll put a piece of scotch tape on each eyebrow so that I can’t pick them if I try. I almost never know when I’m doing it, but even in the middle some times I just tell myself “one more”. It’s a crazy ritual: I pick then I look in the mirror and get really mad then I still pick. I convince myself that some of them feel different than the others and I’m just picking the bad ones…yeah right, before I know it half of an eyebrow is gone and I have to draw it in for a few weeks.

but it has gotten a lot better. about two years ago i started pulling. i was 21 and studying for an intro to social welfare exam during the summer semester. it wasn’t difficult, but there was a lot of reading involved. i remember i started pulling then. it was like something just turned on in my brain and i really liked pulling my brows. it got sooo bad. by that fall (about october) i had completely removed my eyebrows. i have a picture of myself from then and i hate it. i looked so ugly. i diagnosed myself with trichotillomania and found on the internet that there were so many other people with the same problem.

i have reduced my urge to pull to one eyebrow. my left. and i don’t really pull anymore, but mostly rub instead. this helps a little, but it weakens the hairs so much that they end up breaking anyway. it puts little split ends on my eyebrows. i have been trying to be more self-aware, because i really don’t notice myself doing it much, which is horrible dangerous. i’m hoping to stop this soon. i’m tired of having f-ed up eyebrows.

I have been working on my self-awareness (meditating daily, see My Thing #2) and I was able to observe myself doing it and on some level decided it was okay to pull out the really long ones. I did stop myself before it got too out of hand. They look a little sparser than they should, but from a distance the shape is fine. I just wish I hadn’t been so rough on the left one, especially the far corner, which is now bald.

For some reason, when I’m trying to do a math problem or read someone else’s Fortran code and I get frustrated (like today), I start trying to grab onto stray eyebrow hairs and yank them out. Once I start it is hard to stop and I am obviously not using a mirror or tweezers, so it does not make them tidier. Just hell of sparse. It sucks, I am too lazy to pencil them in again, so now I will look kind of weird for a week or two. Again. Darn!!! I was being so good for like over a month!!!! My eyebrows are usually rather strong, I am pale with dark hair, so to me at least it changes my whole face a lot.