Why Doesn’t One Method To Quit Nail Biting Work?

Humans often look for the quick fix and the low hanging fruit when it comes to many parts of life. When it comes to a developed habit like nail biting we often wonder what product we can buy to stick on our nails to quit once and for all, preferably in a few days.

Nail biting is difficult to quit using one single method such as bitter nail polish or fake nails because there tends to be more than one underlying reason for biting one’s nails. A person’s motivation for nail biting and aggressiveness is also relevant and may require a multi-pronged approach.

So while nail biters often focus on quick fixes that they’ve seen advertised that sound like they could help them quit, the reality is that our reason(s) for nail biting might be more sophisticated and not black and white.

Why doesn’t one method to quit nail biting work?

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve better recognized that very few things in life are stark black and white. When it comes to my own nail biting, I spent decades biting my nails without much thought as to why or when. It wasn’t until I put some real effort into quitting that I recognized that I really didn’t know much about my own nail biting habit.

What did I find out?

As I was getting ready to quit, I discovered that I:

• Was actually a nail picker more than nail biter. Although I did both, I generally picked and ripped at nails with my other hand more often than biting them.
• Tended to bite and pick nails privately but would often do it in public too.
• Didn’t necessarily require a trigger like stress or anxiety to do it. I just bit my nails because I felt like it.
• Didn’t need to be bored to bite and pick my nails as I would even do it in the early days of writing articles on this End Nail Biting website when I was busy.
• Would mostly pick and bite nails on my right hand and they were always shorter than the nails on my left hand for some reason. I’m somewhat ambidextrous but am mostly right-handed.

Think about your own nail biting habit and perhaps document it over time to see when you do it and why. You might be surprised.

For me, nail biting and picking was so pervasive and ingrained, I often didn’t even know when I’d done it during the day. I’d look at my nails and realize I wasn’t anywhere close to having to cut or clip them because they were so short. But I couldn’t actually recall during any specific day when I’d bitten them!

So why doesn’t one method to quit nail biting work? Most likely in your case as with mine, your trigger(s) for nail biting is more sophisticated that just one single reason.

Getting hung up on nail biting labels and triggers

I’ve never really been someone who is big on labels. I don’t stereotype people based on their race, place of birth, religion or political leanings and things of that nature. I try to take people individually and recognize that – as mentioned above – life is rarely black and white despite what some people want to believe when it suits them.

Perhaps that’s why I never spent much time worrying about or considering the various triggers that are universally mentioned for nail biting. The common reasons we’re told that we bite our nails include:

• Stress
• Anxiety
• Boredom
• Hunger
• Presence of hangnails
• Perfectionism
• Desire to keep our hands busy
• Mental health concerns

Some researchers have also tried to tie it to issues like obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and major depressive disorder (MDD) among others.

When do you bite or pick your nails?

I never spent much effort considering my own triggers but earlier in life, I can look back with hindsight and say that stress was certainly one of them. But considering I regularly bit and picked nails throughout my life, I can’t say that stress or anxiety was the culprit most of the time. I wasn’t that stressed out! Certainly not on an ongoing basis.

Around the time I finally quit nail biting, it dawned on me that boredom and something to do with my hands were the real reasons I was biting and picking nails at that point in my life.

But again, the more I thought about it the more I realized that even that wasn’t entirely true. I noticed that I bit and (mostly) picked my nails while watching tv and working on my laptop. I didn’t need even need to be bored to do it. I just did it and incorporated it into my regular routine as a matter of course.

I could be active and busy and would still bite and pick my nails whether I had a noticeable trigger or not. It didn’t matter.

I also noticed that I generally didn’t bite or pick nails when I was walking or standing up probably not surprisingly. If I was wearing gloves I obviously couldn’t do it. I tended not to bite or pick nails in front of my wife or younger daughter because they hated when I did it.

Are you the same? What can you document about your nail biting habit that you may not be aware of? You might need to pay more attention to it, just like I finally did.

Rather than getting hung up on labeling yourself with a trigger(s), perhaps it would be more fruitful to document when you bite your nails, why you find yourself doing it, and where you do it.

If you can identify the times you don’t bite and pick your nails, you may be able to decrease the time you do bite and pick your nails when you realize – as I did – that you really don’t need to do it and would prefer to stop.

The problem with relying on an anti-nail biting product and failing is that you end up feeling like a failure even if the product wasn’t what you actually needed in the first place. If you’ve tried to quit nail biting multiple times and failed, the last thing you need is the feeling that you can never quit successfully.