Quitting Nail Biting Is Hard To Do

Quitting nail biting is hard to do otherwise we’d have all quit already. For me, it wasn’t until I started End Nail Biting that I really started to look at my habit and what it meant for me that I fully understood what it was going to take.

My problem was that the habit of nail biting was ingrained in me like breathing or blinking. I didn’t notice or consciously think about it, I just did it.

I never put much of an effort forth to quit nail biting truth be told. I quit off and on over the years but never for more than perhaps a week or so at a time. Whenever I’d stop for a spell, I’d quickly start doing it again.

What is it called when you can’t stop biting your nails?

Onychophagia is the name of the condition that we know better as compulsive nail biting. Of course not all of us actually strictly bite our nails and some of us are nail pickers.

It’s hard to break the nail biting habit. For me, I basically just quit cold turkey shortly after I turned 50 as I’ve stated on other pages on this website. If it was easy to quit I’d have done it much sooner and I suspect you’ve realized that too.

I did quit several times in the past but it was more a matter of temporarily stopping and then starting up again. I look back and laugh when I think that there were a few occasions I can remember when I basically forgot to bite my nails for a week or so when I got busy and got distracted. I’d suddenly notice that my nails were a bit long due to not biting them for a few days, and then I’d bite them again.

To quit nail biting you need willpower

Nail biting for many of us is a habitual habit that becomes so natural it’s would be difficult to chart all the times during the day when we do it. The problem is is that isn’t like other habits such as smoking that requires you to purchase something i.e. cigarettes. Nail biting (and picking) can be done anywhere, at pretty much any time and doesn’t involve buying anything.

In my experience, the initial few days (and perhaps weeks if I’m being honest) of actually quitting nail biting for good was a case of catching myself every time I started picking or biting my nails and just stopping. I really needed to consciously pay attention to my actions and stop myself from doing it each time I started up again.

It was funny because a lot of my nail picking activity that was the hardest to stop was when working on this website. I’d literally take a short break from typing to proofread what I’d written and while reading, would start picking at my nails. I had to consciously stop myself from doing so.

Now that I no longer bite my nails after doing so from around the time I was 8 years old until age 50, I quite literally don’t even think about biting or picking them. Ever.

In the end, quitting nail biting for me was like turning off a light switch although admittedly I did flick the light on and off many, many times until I was able to turn it off completely and for good.

Avoid the gimmicks to quit nail biting

I’ve seen a few things that refer to quitting nail biting in 30 days, 9 minutes and all sorts of other time frames. Quitting any bad habit is hard enough but putting a fake and random time limit on it seems counterproductive to me.

At worst you’ll fail to quit in the allotted time and feel like you failed even though the due date was made up to start with and has no basis in fact.

When I quit nail biting for good, I can’t even guess as to how many days it was between the first time I thought to myself I think I’m going to quit this time for good until the very last day I bit them. It was probably about 3 weeks if I think about it but I can’t be certain and honestly I don’t care. The point is that after biting and picking my nails for about 42 years, I quit and I’m certain it’s for good.

Will anti nail biting polish and cuticle products and wearing gloves help you quit biting your nails?

Perhaps.

But as I mentioned earlier you really do need to want to quit. Current research tends to side with the idea that quitting nail biting is better accomplished through behavioral changes rather than with products. And many researchers now suggest that nail biting and picking is actually a problem rather than a bad habit.

When you couch something as a bad habit, we tend to normalize or at least condone it but when you use the word problem, we tend to think of solutions, don’t we?

Research also seems to suggest that nail biting appears to be more common when a parent(s) does it even after if your parent has quit nail biting before you’re even born. So genetics could possibly play a role. Which means that the bitter nail polish and things of that nature might not offer you a long term solution.

Or maybe it will!

You might want to try it to be safe if nail biting is such a problem for you. If it doesn’t work, at least you can say you ticked it off the list of possible remedies. Bitter nail polish didn’t work for me (only tried it once though….) but it could be worth a try in your personal case.

What’s your next step to quit nail biting?

Check out my article called Quit Biting Your Nails: 10 Things You Need To Know to keep learning.