Our hands are visible and on display for all our waking hours. Even if you wear gloves (PPE), those gloves are being taken on and off throughout your day. Hands on keyboards, hands serving people, hands doing manual tasks. That is a lot of glimpses and glances at your hands and nails - whether you are conscious of noting the condition of them or not.

Looking back I now see that every time I got a glimpse of my hands and nails, I inwardly and silently wished I didn’t bite my nails. That thought created a feeling of shame. So the repeated pattern on a daily basis was…….. glance at hands - wish for a different reality - judge my hands and me - feel shame.

The shorthand over time becomes: Hands = Shame.

My hands/nails became an outward sign, to me, of my inner shame. You may have a different feeling generated from your version of your thoughts; helpless, hopeless, worthless, stressed, failure, anxious etc.

So the thinking - feeling - no action loop would start up in my head, with every glimpse and glance of my hands and nails. Judging myself, being critical, all the backchat about being hopeless. Being in this rather negative emotional and mindset space, did not encourage me to get myself motivated to take any action. All very disempowering.  Crappy thoughts - crappy feelings - zero action to change the status quo. Repeat each day, which becomes another week, which becomes another month, which becomes another year, which becomes another decade. Cyclical. Stuck.

But the hope that I would stop doing this was also present in my head - a battle is going on. I wanted to stop ….. but, didn’t know what, why or how. I’d failed to stop so many times that the thought of ‘trying’ again was painful. It is no accident that words such as battle and fight are used when it comes to changing our habits. A conflict exists between our deepest desires and the subliminal activities of our brain.

The repetitive thought of “I’d like to stop biting my nails” actually created tension and conflict within me. Just because I didn’t recognise or realise it, didn’t mean this wasn’t happening. And that’s without adding living with the day to day physical discomfort of sore, tender, sometimes weeping, fingers into the mix.

When we are in it we don’t see all of this picture. We are too close to it, too zoomed in.

This was my normal. I hadn’t really known any different because the habit had been with me since infancy. We only know our individual experiences, whilst there are similarities person to person, do we ever truly know what another’s lived experience is? A non nail biter cannot really know what the lived, unable to stop at the expense of ourselves, nail biting experience is.

More and more these days, I think of my brain as being a computer, with software, programming, processing activities and memory capacity. The subliminal, automated activities that go on within brains, I view, as being the equivalent of computer processor activity. In regard to my nail biting I was burning through energy and maxing out my processing capacity! All without actually realising it.

No wonder when I permanently stopped biting my nails, there was such a deep sense of relief and freedom. Increased, freed-up, head space. A sense of no longer being held hostage to the habit. A chunk of my processor space had been liberated. The battle was ended. This processing function was no longer being taken up by something totally unproductive, throughout the whole of my day. The pretence of this being necessary to my existence, of being impossible to stop, was finally over.

When I glance at hands now - my thoughts are of success - my feeling is of pride and accomplishment.

The shorthand now is: Hands = Pride

I've gone from Hands = Shame..... to ......Hands = Pride

My clients have the same experience too.

Many of us have a deep desire to stop nail biting. If we didn’t have that desire, the thought would never cross our minds. We are not acknowledging that desire. It’s there for a reason. It is a prompt for us to do something about an issue that is causing inner conflict and taking up our precious energy and focus. What if it’s an inner calling for us to do a hard thing, to get out of the loop we are stuck in? To regain pride, self-confidence and get so much more connected to what is going on mentally and emotionally within us?

It’s easy to dismiss nail biting as being relatively unimportant. But what if it’s the door to up-levelling your life in ways you currently cannot imagine? A client recently said that mastering nail biting has opened up a world of possibility. That is so true. The skills gained by doing the work of ending this habit at all 3 levels - Cognitive, Emotional and Behavioural can translate to so many other areas of our life. 

So, if you have a similar phrases that run through your mind, what are you doing about it? Are you like me and dismissing your desire to stop nail biting because you don’t know HOW? If you, deep down, do want to stop, then spend a little time questioning yourself and write down your answers.