Keep Your Hair On combines personal experience with scientific inquiry to explore the misunderstood world of hair pulling, skin picking and nail biting. These behaviours, known as body-focused repetitive behaviours (BFRBs), are common and can cause a lot of distress, but have been largely neglected by medical science, leaving many to suffer in silence. Clare Mackay shares her own four-decade struggle with hair pulling, while examining what drives these behaviours and why they can make people feel so bad. Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, animal behaviour, dermatology and lived experience, she challenges the stigma and oversimplified assumptions surrounding BFRBs. Mackay offers insights into why these behaviours develop, why they're so hard to stop, and how shame compounds the struggle. Rather than promoting quick fixes, she encourages understanding over judgement and introduces new avenues for management, including the power of self-compassion. This is not a self-help manual, but it may help - by reframing BFRBs not as signs of personal failure, but as interesting, deeply human behaviours that deserve curiosity, care and connection. Clare Mackay is a professor of neuroscience at the University of Oxford.

In 2023, Clare decided to turn her attention to the disorder that had been with her all along, and 'came out' about her secret shame of living with hair pulling disorder. She is committed to raising awareness, improving our understanding and reducing stigma around compulsions to pick, pull or bite.