Body Focused Repetitive Behaviours (BFRBs) with Professor Clare Mackay
Conversations with Annalisa BarbieriShow Notes
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 future ones, ad free then consider becoming a Substacker: https://pocketannalisa.substack.com/. From £5 a month or £50 (2025 rates) a year you'll get access to all new podcasts as soon as they are available and before general release and ad-free.
You can also support us by sharing this podcast far and wide, it's available wherever you listen to your podcasts. And leaving a review if you can. Thank you so much.
Produced by Hester Cant. Art work by Lo Cole. Music by Toby Dunham.
So, could BFRBs be a misfire with this neuron? We discuss this and talk in depth about what BFRBs are, what they’re not, how to deal with them if you suffer from them and there’s some really useful advice for parents with children with BFRBs.
Clare’s written a fascinating book called Keep your Hair on, which is published on April 2nd 2026. I hope you enjoy this fascinating episode and with grateful thanks to Emily Tammam for the suggestion. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/conversations-with-annalisa-barbieri. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from Conversations with Annalisa Barbieri
I am not a fan of the saying “let’s agree to disagree”, it can be so passive aggressive. But it’s the title of Gabrielle Rifkind’s new book and maybe this pass-agg comment deserves an upgrade.
This episode was not easy to name. The subject is highly topical, but the take on it is original and thought-provoking.
In this episode I’m in conversation with David Robson. David is an award winning science writer and author of three books, one of which The Laws of Connection, we really delve into here. David graduated from Cambridge university with a maths degree, has worked as features editor at the New Scientist, was a senior journalist at BBC Future and his work has appeared in various newspapers and journals such as The Guardian and The Atlantic.
Dr Sophie Behrman is a is a general adult psychiatrist and works in a community mental health team in Oxford. She’s set up an NHS menopause and menstrual disorders clinic, open to women who fit a certain criteria. She’s also edited a book called “Menopause, Menstrual Cycles and Mental Health” which is published by Cambridge University Press in June 2026. In the last series Sophie and I talked about the menopause and its impact on a woman’s brain and in this one we are talking about how the menstrual cycle, and the fluctuation of hormones can affect us physiologically.
I first came across the concept of dissociation when I saw a film called Sybil starring Sally Field and Joanne Woodward. It was about a young woman with multiple personalities. Sybil would dissociate and her various personalities would take over.