Why is it bad to bite your nails when it feels so good when we do it? Nail biters and pickers know that feeling when we bite off a nail and it just feels right and we can’t quite explain why we feel so good about doing it. Especially when you consider what a dirty habit nail biting really is.
While nail biting has negative health implications including potential damage to the mouth and teeth along with an increased likelihood of infections, it also affects us mentally the longer we are unable to quit. It ultimately makes quitting even more difficult.
Why Is It Bad To Bite Your Nails?
Nail Biting And Picking Side Effects
I’ve written a number of articles on this site that discuss common health side effects that you can face over time that may not be noticed right away but that are still worrisome and dangerous:
Outside of the physical health downsides of biting your nails, there are other potentially serious issues that may arise on the mental health side, too.
Obsession With Quitting Nail Biting
Do you obsess about quitting your nail biting habit? One of the things I noticed by checking out various online forums where nail biting is discussed is the amount of time and effort people put into quitting. They take pictures of their bitten nails currently. They take pictures of their nails after not biting them for a week or a month. There becomes an obsession in my opinion with the quitting part. People go online to get support and help from other nail biters.
But if you are asking for help from other people who also can’t quit biting their nails, is it really going to help you? If you’re struggling with math do you ask for help from someone who has trouble with the same things you don’t know?
And if you’re exposed to people who keep telling you that they quit for 2 weeks and then started biting their nails again, is that going to motivate you to quit or is it going to make you more likely to assume that you are in the exact same boat that they are, and give up too?
Nail Biting And Increased Anxiety
I tried accessing a popular stock trading forum in the past year because I thought it would give me good advice on how to trade. I figured out quickly that it was in fact a cesspool of opinions and hot takes, often from people who had failed and were in a bad trade they couldn’t get out of. I asked myself if I was actually getting anything valuable from being on this forum. The answer was no. So I stopped visiting that site completely.
It never previously even dawned on me to go online on forums to ask for help to learn anything, let alone quitting nail biting. Then again, I’ve never gone online and asked Internet strangers for advice on anything. It just isn’t in my nature. Not judging. I’m just saying that I personally don’t understand the concept. If I ask for help, I’d like it to be from someone who I am certain knows the subject better than me.
From what I see on nail biting forums, it’s a constant stream of pictures of peoples’ bitten nails. Posters who talk about falling off the wagon again. People who quit nail biting for a week and then start up again. Plus the very regular I’m ready to give up and just keep biting my nails posts. It’s enough to make anyone want to give up trying to quit.
People talk about anxiety being a main trigger for nail biting. If anything I wonder if being exposed to people who can’t quit nail biting and announce it repeatedly online is enough to make you even more anxious, about your actual nail biting habit?
My suggestion? If you want to speak with Internet strangers about quitting nail biting, just make sure it doesn’t do more harm than good. With due respect, don’t let others’ failure to quit take you down the same path.
Nail Biting And Increased Self-Hatred
The online nail biting forums seem to normalize the self-hatred that people have when they try to quit biting their nails and fail, often repeatedly. If quitting nail biting was easy we’d all do it and be done with it. But surrounding yourself with other people who also can’t quit biting their nails, who you don’t actually know anything about? Not sure that’s a recipe for success.
When I look at some of these online forums and people are discussing their nail biting failures, it makes me feel like a failure and as I’m typing this, I’m several months into having quit nail biting! So I actually should feel like a winner because I finally managed to quit after 40 years. But after reading through some people’s comments I see why people start to hate themselves over their nail biting.
And the more you read the failures of other people who can’t quit their nail biting, the more you’re likely to feel like a failure too. How does that possibly help you?
Quitting Nail Biting Requires Help From Someone Who Can Help
Nail biting can be very difficult to quit, we know that. But when people approach strangers to quit doing something, they usually do so knowing that there is a person leading the event who knows what they are doing.
If you attend a meeting to quit alcohol, the meeting is typically led by someone who used to drink and now helps others quit or at least by a professional who has relevant skills. It’s not led by someone who starts the meeting talking about how they can’t quit drinking too and wants you to help them. That’s not how it works.
Nail Biting Wastes Time And Money
I was perusing an online forum where nail biters discuss their issues and attempts to quit. One poster took a picture of several anti-nail biting products that they had just purchased to try to quit (again). They mentioned that they typically quit for two weeks at a time and then start biting their nails again.
It made me feel bad because when I saw the photo of the anti-nail biting products that they hope will help them – cuticle pusher, nail file and cuticle oil – I realized that in actuality none of these are going to help the average person quit nail biting, in all likelihood.
Sure, your cuticles will be soft and your nails will be nicely filed with these products. But is that why you were biting your nails in the first place? A problem with your cuticles? It would be like buying cigarettes to quit drinking alcohol.
First off, none of these things were designed to help nail biters quit. That’s not the purpose of any of these products. Secondly you’re just avoiding dealing with the problem that you actually face.
Buying Anti Nail Biting Products That Don’t Work
My mum tried to help me quit nail biting when I was around 10 years old. She paid me $10 to quit biting them and I had to show her my nails every day as proof. It worked for about 2 weeks from memory. I started biting them again and had to give the $10 back.
So we then tried the bitter nail polish, only one time though. I do remember putting a finger in my mouth to see how bad it was and it tasted gross. But it left a shine on my nails and as a ten year old boy in 1980, that wasn’t really the look I wanted especially after a kid at school asked me if I was wearing nail polish. So we gave up on that, too.
I never tried the anti-nail biting gloves or nail covers so I can’t comment on that. Maybe it will help and might be worth a try. I never seriously considered either.
But in my experience, if you approach nail biting with some thought behind it, you need to get to the root of the problem and truly understand why you bite your nails even if you think you already know. For years – decades actually – I thought I bit my nails due to stress and anxiety and in part that was true.
Then I really started to look at my nail biting behavior and found out that I:
- Was actually more of a nail picker than biter. Probably 80% nail picking, 20% nail biting.
- Picked and bit nails whenever I felt like it more than it being due to a specific trigger like stress. I just did it because I felt like it.
- Had never really thought much about why I had this habit and hadn’t been able to quit doing it. I thought that I had put a great deal of effort into learning about my behavior but really I had not!
- Realized that I had also never truly tried to quit. I had no willpower and had also not put forth much effort to stop doing my nails.
Summary
At the end of the day, your path to quitting nail biting and picking may be different from mine and different from everyone else. If you believe in the old adage that You won’t know unless you try, testing certain anti-nail biting products might make sense for you.
Before you go out and spend money that you may not need to, do have a very long and thorough think about why you bite your nails and try to think beyond the level of I bite my nails when I get stressed out. You may find as I did that the reason that you bite your nails is a lot simpler than that:
You like biting them, you haven’t put forth much effort to quit, and you don’t really want to quit otherwise you would have. You really have to want to quit, it’s that simple.
Check out my article Nail Biting And Willpower and see if this makes sense to you and if you think it could help you the same way it helped me.
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