How Do Psychologists Stop Biting Nails?

When we talk about walking a mile in another person’s shoes, we’re essentially saying how would it feel to be that person? What would that person do in a particular situation and how can I apply it to my life? If a psychologist who understands human behavior was a nail biter I wonder what they would do to quit nail biting using their professional training as a guideline.

A psychologist would tell you that you have to want to stop biting your nails. Rather than avoiding or suppressing the habit, willpower is required to stop nail biting since it’s an easy habit to start. It doesn’t require you to buy anything unlike other habits like smoking or drinking and you can easily quit and start biting your nails repeatedly if you don’t get to the root cause and aren’t persistent.

Too many anti-nail biting products and strategies focus on avoidance or masking the problem rather than focusing on the important things that will actually help you quit for good. So to help quit biting our nails, let’s think like a psychologist would and do it professionally and logically.

How Do Psychologists Stop Biting Nails?

A psychologist will focus on understanding why you bite and/or pick your nails to get to the root of the problem. Among other things they may advise you to do:

Put forth an effort to quit

This was the hardest and easiest thing for me. It was difficult because I never really thought about seriously quitting. Nor did I realize that for me certainly, I really hadn’t wanted to quit up until the time that I eventually did quit. If I had wanted to quit, I would have done so years ago.

The easy part? The actual quitting part. For me – at age 50 after over 40 years of nail biting – I just quit. It was like the old tv ads I used to see for an anti-smoking product where the actor in the ad said “It was my time to quit.” That’s what it was for me, too. It was my time to quit nail biting.

Of course if quitting nail biting was that easy, we’d have all done it years ago. No one said it would be easy just like cigarette smoking or heavy drinking is difficult for many people to quit. You hear about people going cold turkey and quitting right away and think I could never do that.

I thought that too, during the rare times I actually thought about quitting. But once I started working on this website and reading more research about nail biting, I thought about how ridiculous it was that I was putting together an anti-nail biting website and here I was still biting my own nails.

The more I became aware of what I was doing, the more I began to think about quitting for real.

Monitor your behavior

Putting this website together made me really think about my nail biting behavior. You’d think I’d already know all of this stuff but I didn’t. After 40+ years of doing it, you’d think that I would be fully aware of my nail biting habits but I wasn’t.

What I found out was :

• I was actually a nail picker most of the time and a part-time nail biter. I generally picked at nails with my other hand rather than putting my fingers in my mouth to bite them.
• I didn’t actually bite my nails because of the common triggers that we read about like stress, anxiety, frustration, boredom. I certainly did this in the past but at present time, I was just picking and biting my nails for something to do. I just did it. No real reason or excuse!
• I generally bit my nails while working on my laptop, while watching tv or just sitting doing nothing. Most times I bit my nails at home but occasionally I’d do it while at someone else’s house discreetly.
• I predominantly bit and picked nails on my right hand. I was aware of this but I didn’t – and still don’t – know why. I’m mostly right-handed (writing, playing most sports) but I use my left hand for precision stuff like using tools, throwing a ball or darts. Many nail biters do it to both hands consistently and evenly. I didn’t.

Monitor your behavior for a week or longer to see where you bite your nails (physical location, work/home, etc), when you bite them (time of day, under what circumstances) and determine if you generally bite nails, pick your nails or both. Write it down to document your results because after a day or so, you’ll forget important details. Visually seeing your behavior can help to change it.

Treat the habit as being important

Nail biting and picking might not be on the same scale as excessive drinking, gambling, drug use or smoking but if you don’t do any of those things and only bite your nails, then it is the most important thing to quit, as far as you’re concerned.

One problem with nail biting is that side effects aren’t seen right away. Just like smoking cigarettes for 2 weeks won’t cause many health effects right away, nail biting may not cause health problems with your mouth, jaws and nails itself for years or longer. Or maybe not at all. I bit nails for 40+ years and I’m not sure I suffered any long term damage. None that I am aware of.

As a result, quitting nails was never a major concern for me. There was no catalyst or aha moment for me to say I have to quit. So I didn’t. Perhaps had I taken the habit more seriously I’d have been more motivated to quit.

Change your habits

Rather than biting and picking my nails, I started to catch myself every time I did it and stopped. In the past I just bit and picked until I was done. This time I would catch myself (monitored my behavior) every time I started biting or picking my nails and I stopped immediately (I wanted to quit). So rather than just going on as usual, I changed my habit which up until recently meant just giving in and doing my nails when it suited me.

The first few times I caught myself and stopped nail biting right away, I wondered to myself how long it would last. I’d been biting and picking my nails for over forty years. How could I be expected to just quit as if I had never had the habit in the first place? I felt like the habit was so natural that I could never have a real chance to quit. It was too ingrained in my personality.

It turns out that for me, quitting wasn’t as hard as I thought. I’m not sure I could have quit 10 years ago for example – maybe not even 5 years ago actually – but I was able to quit this time around. Again, if it was this easy I’d have quit by age 10 when my mum paid me $10 to stop biting my nails.

So while quitting the habit may not be easy, it doesn’t necessarily have to be difficult either. You do need willpower though.

Look for substitutes

You can try to substitute nail biting and picking for other activities to wean yourself off the habit and also distract yourself while you work on building up willpower. Think of it like a nicotine patch for long term smokers: It’s a crutch as you wean yourself off tobacco until you get to the point where you can lose the patch and not have the nicotine cravings anymore.

You may find a number of substitutes can replace nail biting and picking and serve as a distraction you every time you have the urge:

Keep your hands busy. You can’t bite your nails or even pick them if you’re holding your cellphone, your coffee mug, silly putty, a golf ball, a stress ball or otherwise keeping your hands busy. You can’t do it all the time but walking around your office or home holding these things isn’t the strangest thing in the world and might help distract you from your nails.

Find something to crack with your mouth. Our mouth and brain get used to crunching on our nails so replace it with healthy unshelled sunflower seeds. They’re nutritional, low in calories and fat and take time to stick in your mouth and crunch away which helps to mimic the chewing of your nails. It’s a time-consuming activity to take your mind off biting your nails but you’re also eating food too so it’s like getting a bonus snack while you quit a bad habit. Don’t like sunflower seeds? Cut raw carrots up into small pieces and crunch on them throughout the day.

Chew gum or mints. Again, it’s something to stick in your mouth and chew on. I like chewing gum and mints from time to time and it distracted me from my nails. I had a good think about this: I honestly don’t ever remember chewing gum or having a mint in my mouth and biting my nails while doing it. I think I subconsciously was satisfied with the gum or mints and it wasn’t until I got rid of the gum or finished the mint that I reverted back to nail biting. I never bit or chewed nails while eating or drinking either come to think of it.

Be persistent. I want to say that my nail biting habit was hard to quit because of how long I did it. But can I really say it was difficult to quit if I never really put much effort in to quit along the way? When I think back, I never seriously tried to quit nail biting in all the years I did it.

I keep referring to my habit as nail biting when in fact I was more of a nail picker, too. I didn’t even know my own behavior which shows you how little effort I put into quitting. I was hardly even aware at times that I was picking or biting my nails.

Since I hadn’t cut or clipped my nails in decades, I was clearly doing it. But at the end of a particular day I’d look at my nails and see that they were shorter than the day before but couldn’t actually remember when I’d picked or bit them on that specific day. When your nail biting habit is subconscious like mine was, you really need to put the effort forth to monitor your behavior and start to change it in small ways so that your new habit becomes not biting and picking your nails.

Persistence is key because as mentioned above, nail biting and picking is so easy to start and there are no barriers to entry so to speak.

Psychology of Nail Biting

Various medical professionals have over many decades tried to label nail biting and put them into various categories:

• Oral fixation according to Sigmund Freud. This is now debunked.
• Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Biting nails might be obsessive for some but personally I never felt compulsion to do it. I just did it because I felt like it.
• Perfectionism. Some researches believe we bite our nails out of frustration at not completing a task quickly enough or to our satisfaction so we bite nails to deal with it.
• Triggers. A popular long term school of thought is that we bite nails out of boredom, frustration, anxiety, stress or a reaction to a situation where we’re out of sorts.
• Mental Illness. I don’t think this is even worth commenting on but it has been mentioned by some researchers.
• Just because we can. Sometimes we bite our nails just for something to do. This certainly applied to me and is the reason that stands out the most personally.

There are a wide variety of thoughts but the bottom line seems to be putting nail biting under a classification even though people clearly bite nails for various reasons. And research rarely discusses nail picking specifically nor does it distinguish between nail picking and nail biting and tends to mention picking only in passing.

The truth is that we bite and pick our nails for individual reasons and sometimes the reasons change depending on the circumstances. Depending on the person, putting nail biting under one of the above headings may or may not be accurate.

And for me, I have to say that as I got older, I never even noticed that the triggers that perhaps applied in the past – stress and anxiety typically – really didn’t apply anymore. Now I was just picking and biting nails without reason.

Look over the above list and ask which category (or categories) describe you? Maybe your reason isn’t listed at all. While I did in the past deal with stress and anxiety with nail picking and biting, by the time I quit the habit it was just laziness on my part that had kept me going so long. I wasn’t picking or biting nails for any particular reason or trigger. I just hadn’t put enough effort forth to quit.

Satisfaction of Nail Biting

Long time nail biters and pickers know the satisfaction of biting nails especially when you rip off a big one. You can’t really explain it to a non-nail biter. “Why you do bite your nails” they ask. Only we know why…

There is some perverse pleasure in nail biting for some reason except when we bite off too much and our finger hurts for a few days but we know that’s part of the deal. The pain will pass and we’ll have to be a bit more careful next time. Or not.

That’s at least part of the reason I don’t understand nor do I agree with the OCD diagnosis when it comes to nail biting. Not for me anyways. It was never compulsive. I rarely even thought about nail biting let alone thought about quitting. I just did it. There was nothing compulsive about my nail biting. I did it whenever I felt like it and sometimes I didn’t even know I was doing it. It was like breathing. It just happened.

You’ve Got To Want To Quit

This was the one thing that stuck out for me when I finally quit nail biting and picking:

You’ve got to want to stop biting and picking your nails otherwise you won’t.

Nail biting isn’t like drinking excessively, eating too much or smoking and trying to quit or at least cutting back in the case of the first two problems:

• You don’t need to buy anything to bite your nails. You just do it.
• You can do it pretty much anytime and anywhere.
• Outwardly there appears to be no long term negatives to biting and picking nails. There are plenty of long term health problems related to tooth, mouth, and stomach health but at the time we’re biting our nails, these side effects don’t seem like a problem so there is no incentive to quit.
• It’s easy to quit. And start again. And bite your nails for many years and never even try to quit again.
• We tend not to receive help to quit nail biting. No ads on tv for Nail Biters Anonymous or a patch that we put on our hands to quit nail biting. We kind of have to do it ourselves.

Summary

When I finally quit picking and biting my nails, I was surprised at how little effort it actually took. I was a nail biter and picker my whole life, certainly as far back as a young child. But since I didn’t quit until the age of 50 I can’t reasonably say that it was an easy habit to break otherwise I’d have done it much sooner.

While I had tried several times in the past to quit nail biting, I look back with hindsight and admit that the effort just wasn’t there. On occasion, I would notice my nails suddenly getting longer and realized that I hadn’t bit or picked them in several days. I might have gone another day or so without biting or picking them before starting again and going back to square one. The effort to quit nail biting never really existed on my part.

By the time I did quit, it was very uneventful and sudden. I basically just stopped. The catalyst was really starting up this website End Nail Biting. Specifically, I really started thinking about my nail biting and picking activities and the reason(s) for doing so. Once I became fully aware of my nail picking and biting behavior, it’s almost like I realized that I didn’t need to do this anymore and really didn’t want to either. For me, it was that simple.

It may be more difficult for you to quit – and to stay quit – depending on your personal situation, triggers, age, etc. While I occasionally may notice a jagged fingernail and start picking at it, I now quickly catch myself and stop doing it. I think of how well I’ve done by quitting and recognize that I don’t want to go back to a mindset where biting and picking my nails is considered normal for me.

In that regard, I have to say that the biggest success factor for me to quit nail biting and picking was mental. It was acknowledging and noticing my exact nail biting and picking behavior, building up willpower to stop doing it, being persistent and having a strong ongoing desire not to start doing it again.