Big, Bad Habits: Fingernail Biting (and What’s Helping Me Stop)

Inadvertently, one of my self-improvement resolutions this year is to stop biting my fingernails. I actually tried to stop gnawing on them about a week before the New Year, simply because I had become curious if I would actually be able to allow the nail beds to reassert themselves if I left them alone for a few months.

It’s driving me nuts, of course, but like quitting smoking, every time I resist I get ever-so-slightly more able to deal with the craving and compulsions. Here’s what’s worked for me so far. (If you don’t bite your nails, you’ll find some of this gross; sorry!)

• Leave the cuticles alone – Because the daily dunk in the septic slop of a human mouth causes the skin around the nails to become chapped and infected, many nail biters have become used to peeling and cracking skin around the nails. It’s easy to fiddle and worry these little flaps of skin in lieu of not biting your nails, which is both preventing them from properly healing and encouraging you to get your fingers back into your mouth.

I cut back any hanging, scratching bits of skin with a clipper, then began lotioning and oiling my fingertips as often as I remembered to do so. It’s taken about a week, but the skin around the nails to mostly free of flaps and protrusions. It was important to use a tool to remove the painful pieces at first, not only because a tool does a cleaner job, but because I have to completely break myself of picking at my fingers with other fingers or my teeth.

This doesn’t mean that I’m cutting off the thick edges at the outside tips of the nails, however scratchy they may become. It seems like my fingers are trying to grow the skin back around the edges of my nail, which is pretty amazing—not only does my body know how to grow nails, it knows how to repair them when they’ve been damaged in this particular way. Neat!

• Don’t look at them – If I let myself, I will sit and stare at my fingernails, scoping out likely candidates for biting. I’ve probably done this same scan tens of thousands of times in my life, if my dozens-of-times-a-day pattern of the last week is any indication. Seemingly innocuous, I’ve still tried to break myself of this part of the habit. It’s a step removed from the actual nail biting, but still part of the process that I’m trying to reprogram.

• Don’t clean them – I’m not entirely sure about this one, but it seems to make sense. The whites of my nails start much farther down the fingertip than those of non-nail-biting folk, so there’s a lot more space for stuff to get up under there as they grow out. In the past, I’ve obsessively cleaned that out, which I am betting did two negative things: allowed me to focus again on my nails instead of putting them out of my mind entirely; I also suspect that my nail bed won’t actually reattach if I keep scraping it out.

It’s not like I’ve been replacing oil filters or anything, though, so they’re not too gross. They also seem to get pretty clean after I wash my hair, so I’m going to go with it while it seems to work. If anyone knows about the actual process of re-growing/reattaching the nail bed, I’d love to hear it.

• Just don’t bite them – By focusing on the all the things I usually did before I chewed on my nails instead of just trying to resist the itching urge to bite them, I’ve been able to attack the supporting habits instead of the primary one. That’s not to say it’s not difficult—especially while sitting here writing about it!—but it’s worth a shot. i’d like to have hands that I wasn’t ashamed of as they cracked and bled.

The less I think about it, the better, trying to just ignore the strange sensations that are almost entirely in my head. It feels like my fingertips are tripping.

Image via Di Stefano Productions—Corpses for Sale! (Not my actual fingers, I’m saying.)