I Quit Nail Biting At Age 50 (I’m A Quitter)

I started biting and picking my nails as a kid and while I don’t remember the exact age, it was probably around the age of 8 give or take. I remember my mum repeatedly asking me to quit but that didn’t work.

I remember her trying the bitter nail polish on me one time. Just one time. That didn’t work either.

I also remember when she paid me $10 to quit and then got her money back when I fell off the wagon about 2 weeks later.

It would be difficult to give a fair estimation of the number of times over the years that I’ve had someone – typically my mum, wife or younger daughter – asking me to stop biting or picking my nails. It would have to be in the hundreds of times if not more I’d imagine.

Nail biting and picking is a dirty habit especially when you see other people doing it. But there is something really satisfying about it. Sure, you can bite off too much and your finger will hurt for a few days but the nail slowly grows back and you can start biting it again. The feeling of ripping and tearing a nail off just right feels pretty good, doesn’t it?

On this website I’ve written in detail about various reasons for nail biting, research that discusses aspects of it, a long personal case study of my nail biting story and how using online forums might actually make your nail biting harder to quit.

Visiting anti-nail biting online forums may do you more harm than good I’m afraid. I visited the one on Reddit and was bombarded with posts of people asking for help quitting. I was trying to quit too…If I knew what I was doing, you think I’d be on a forum for quitting nail biting?

Many posts included gross pictures of bitten finger nails that I could barely look at and I’m in no way squeamish. I try to avoid putting too many bitten finger nail pics on this site because if you wanted to see bitten fingernails you could look at your own hands, right? You know how bad they look. We all do.

I also came across many posts where people were asking for advice on what anti-nail biting products to buy. Other than the bitter nail polish that my mum bought me when I was a kid, I’ve not bought a single nail biting product ever. I never saw the value or point in any.

If you’re just masking the problem of nail biting with bitter nail polish, wearing gloves or using cuticle cream, you aren’t getting to the root of the problem. Which I believe is what you need to do to stop biting your nails.

I wrote an article called Mask Wearing And Nail Biting which could be argued is the same thing: Masking (no pun intended) the problem of nail biting with a product. But I do see the value of wearing a mask to try to help quit nail biting because it’s in the context of if you’re going to wear a mask because of COVID, perhaps there is a side benefit to be had.

If you have a mask on your face, you can’t bite your nails and will eventually get used to not biting them. Your new nail habit will be to not bite them.

For me, it got to the point where nail biting wasn’t even a habit. It was basically an unconscious activity. I mean it’s not like cigarette smokers unknowingly go outside and light up a cigarette. They know they’re doing it and often plan their smoke breaks at a certain time with other people.

Nail biting is different. You can do it anytime, any place and by yourself or in front of others. Quitting and starting up again is easy. It costs no money and you don’t need to purchase anything to take part.

And the side effects? We don’t really think about the common side effects because they may never appear and if they do, it could be years from now. For me, I never even knew about many of the side effects until around the time I was quitting!

So How Did I Quit Nail Biting At Age 50?

I started up this End Nail Biting website and things started happening! While I don’t necessarily recommend starting up a website to quit whatever you’d like to stop doing, the point is that I really started paying attention to my nail biting and picking habit when I began working on this website. You’ll notice I refer to biting and picking because I actually did both, mostly nail picking in fact.

Try searching online for nail picking research specifically. I couldn’t find any. The habit is always referred to as nail biting or biting your nails. I wasn’t really even aware of my habit type (picking) until I started this website and made mental notes of my behavior.

In that regard, I also spent time thinking about various nail biting triggers that would set me off and cause me to bite them. It didn’t take me long to recall the times in the past when I did deal with stress or anxiety by biting my nails. However I also noticed as I was trying to quit that I really didn’t need a reason to bite my nails. I did it whenever I felt like it.

Moral of the story? Pay attention to and learn about the nail biting triggers – the reasons – that cause you to bite or pick your nails. But don’t obsess about them if they don’t exist or aren’t the most important aspect to you. If you’re like me, you might just bite your nails for the same reason you twirl your hair, whistle or lean back in your chair on the back legs: You do it because you feel like it.

In that regard, if you’re at the point of biting or picking your nails just out of habit and not because of any particular trigger or reason, it may be easier for you to quit once and for all like me.

Final thoughts

I ended up quitting nail biting a few months into the COVID pandemic. I think that was largely a coincidence but the coronavirus spread did get me thinking more about every time I would consider putting my finger in my mouth to bite a nail or would pick at them with the other hand. Perhaps you can use this as motivation to quit.

I wouldn’t be concerned about focusing on quitting cold turkey although it can be done. Also avoid putting a time frame on quitting because when you say you’re going to quit in X days and fail, you haven’t really failed since the date was just random anyways but your brain might tell you otherwise.

One of the things that I have noticed about having nice nails now is that things I couldn’t do before:

• I can now open cans with lids without grabbing a knife or other object.
• My nails feels smooth rather than being hacked up, short and bitten as they used to.
• I can scratch and itch myself now and it actually works.
• I can scratch lottery tickets and things of that nature too without grabbing a coin.

So while other people may have spent part of their 2020 picking up a new bad habit, I managed to get rid of one. The actual getting rid of it part ended up being less dramatic than I thought, too.