Stop Biting Your Nails With This Simple Technique!

Are you a nail-biter? Scientists have found a proven technique that should help you stop!

According to the TLC Foundation, body-focused repetitive behaviours (BFRB) are any ‘repetitive self-grooming behaviour that involves biting, pulling, picking, or scraping one’s hair, skin, lips, cheeks, or nails that can lead to physical damage to the body and have been met with multiple attempts to stop or decrease the behaviour.’

While not everybody who bites their nails or squeezes their spots has a compulsion to do so, those who do struggle to stop – and their so-called bad habit can have a lasting impact. 

But researchers in Germany have found that ‘habit replacement’ could be the key to breaking free from damaging behaviours, like pulling out hair and eyelashes or biting the inside of your cheek. 

Replacement treatments can include, softly circling the index and middle finger around the top of the thumb without touching the nails, crossing the arms and stroking the hair on the forearms or putting the fingertips of both hands together and then softly circling the fingertips against each other.

Those who followed the replacement treatment therapy for six weeks said they saw an improvement. 

Though it’s not clear how effective the method is in the long-term, it’s clear that in the short-term, habit replacements may be able to help you quit biting your nails, which could at the very least buy you some time to work out some more future-proof methods – so why not give it a try?