Body Focused Repetitive Behaviours (BFRBs) with Professor Clare Mackay

About this episode

Annalisa Barbieri discusses Body Focused Repetitive Behaviours with Professor Clare Mackay, exploring their implications and neuroscience.

Welcome back to Series 11 and episode 3. What are BFRBs? It's picking, biting or pulling, skin, nails or hair or Body Focused Repetitive Behaviours. Here I’m in conversation with Professor Clare Mackay, Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Oxford. Professor Mackay has spent over thirty years studying the structure and function of the human brain. In 2023 she turned her attention to a disorder she’d been living with for most of her life: hair pulling, which comes under the umbrella of BFRBS. BFRBs are often done unconsciously at first and, as we’ll learn, are a throw back to primate grooming behaviour gone a bit awry. Most of us do have some BFRBs, we may pick the skin around our nails, or bite our nails or even become fixated with plucking that stray hair, but it’s when it goes into overdrive that it  can  become a problem. In this episode we find out about a fascinating neuron which surrounds every hair follicle called the CT fibre, which, when stimulated (stroked etc) by someone we trust releases endorphins. This is why we love having our hair or skin stroked or touched (or those fabulous head massages!). If you'd like to listen to this episode, past or…

People in this episode

Host: Annalisa Barbieri

Guest: Professor Clare Mackay

Topics covered

• Body Focused Repetitive Behaviours
• neuroscience
• mental health
• hair pulling
• skin picking
• endorphins

Keywords

• BFRBs
• neuroscience
• hair pulling
• skin picking
• endorphins
• CT fibre
• mental health

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: University of Oxford

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