Six Benefits Of Cutting Your Own Hair

Six Benefits Of Cutting Your Own Hair

For quite some time, I’ve been cutting my own hair. Ever since businesses were temporarily closed up during lock down, people have had to go months without a professional haircut.

While some folks elected to leave their hair long, others decided to take matters into their own hands and cut their own hair.

Through the years I have realized many benefits of cutting your own hair.

Let’s take a look at some of them.

 

Time To Yourself

One of the benefits of cutting your own hair is having time to yourself.

As a busy professional and a dedicated parent, I’m often balancing time between work and taking care of my daughter. Once in a while, I manage to hang out with my wife too! Precious time for myself can feel few and far between.

But when I cut my own hair, i’m alone with just my clippers, scissors, mirrors, upbeat music, and nothing else.

It’s my “me time” and I savor it.

 

Meditation

Cutting your own hair can be a form of meditation. It requires a good degree of mindfulness. To do it well (and safely), you need a deep focus on the task at hand.

If you’re not focused, you may mess up. And if you’re totally distracted, you can risk cutting yourself.

While many people think of meditation as sitting still with your eyes closed in a quiet setting, movement meditation is a common practice as well. It usually involves gentle forms of motion in which you are fully present in the moment letting the movements guide you. Examples include yoga, hiking in the woods, swimming, and gardening.

Cutting your own hair can be another form of movement meditation

 

It’s a Relaxing Art

There’s an art to everything. Cutting your own hair is no exception.

When I cut my own hair I think of myself as an artist. Similar to an Italian Renaissance sculptor chiseling away at a piece of marble, I’m shearing away the medusa-like locks on my head.

I also compare cutting my own hair to bonsai art. Sometimes I picture myself as a Japanese zen gardener meticulously trimming a bonsai tree.

Cutting your own hair is an art and it allows you to be creative.  You have the power to express how you want to look and feel!

 

Building Skills

Cutting your own hair is definitely a good skill to have. You may not be good at it at first. But it’s just like everything else; the more you do it, the better you become.

The disciplined practice of learning, adapting, growing, and improving any skill is an key component of success and fulfillment. Cutting your own hair is an easy skill to learn and build. There are plenty of tutorials and videos online that show you how to do it.

The best part is that you can self-experiment, fix your mistakes real-time, and learn as you go. Don’t worry if you mess up. For most people, your hair will grow back. Learn and grow from your mistakes!

It never hurts to build more skills. The most important capital is your own human capital. Cutting your hair may improve your hand eye coordination. Who knows, it may even improve your fluid intelligence. And if you get good at it, cutting hair may even earn you extra cash as a side hustle if your main gig doesn’t work out.

 

Save Money

This is one of the more obvious ones. It goes without saying, cutting your own hair can save you a lot of money.

The average cost of a men’s haircut in the United States is $28 according to US News. But that doesn’t include the tip and the cost of transportation to get to the hair salon or barber shop.

For the sake of simplicity, let’s just say a haircut costs $30. Most men get haircuts every month. So therefore it’s reasonable to assume that the average man would spend about $360 a year on a hair cut.

I’ve been doing it for 25 years. Let’s see how much money I have saved assuming I invested this money in some investment that earns 6% compounded every year.

$22,487.37 is not bad.

 

Save Time

Another benefit of cutting your own hair is the ability to save more time.

Let’s take a closer look. Factoring in the transportation time to a barber shop or hair salon, waiting for your turn, and the time it takes for the actual hair cut itself, it could be two hours. To be conservative, let’s say it all takes roughly an hour an a half to get your hair professionally cut.

I can cut my hair in 30 minutes. So that saves me about an hour every time I give myself a haircut. And this is all from the convenience of my own home!

Time is the most valuable asset we have. It’s priceless, scarce, and there doesn’t seem to be enough of it.

How we monetarily value our time is highly subjective. But there are calculators out there that allow us to estimate it. Using this calculator, it appears that I value my time at about $175 an hour.

Taking this into consideration, every time I cut my hair I am saving $175 (the cost of an hour) plus $30 (the cost of an average men’s haircut and tip). That equals $205.

But it’s not all about how much money I saved. I value time much more than money. The hour I saved is precious time that I can spend doing something I enjoy with family and the people that I love.

 

Final Thoughts

Businesses like barber shops and hair salons are slowly opening up again. But during the lock down, some people had a taste of what it’s like to cut their own hair.

Hopefully during this time, they realized some of the benefits of cutting your own hair. It can be a relaxing time that you carve out just for yourself. And once you build your skills and get really good at it, cutting your own hair truly becomes a meditative and relaxing art.

Saving money is a huge plus. But saving valuable time by cutting your hair is even more important.

Imagine doing something that saves money, precious time, and it’s something you find relaxing and fun.

For me, that something is cutting my own hair 😀