We bite our nails in response to our Feelings, for example the feeling of ‘anxiety’. I know people who even bite their nails in response to the feeling of ‘happy’ - when the happiness is intense!

Most humans feel some degree of anxiety at some point in their life. Not everyone in the world bites their nails. Some people eat until they are uncomfortably full or drink until they are numb or binge watch a Netflix series, all in response to their feelings e.g. anxiety, bored, frustrated, sad, lonely, restless, confused etc.

Anxiety is simply a feeling - a vibration in our body. But our dislike of this feeling is what has us trying to run away from it, escape, in ways that can be detrimental to our health and wellbeing.

We learned this escape as young children. No-one taught us how to experience our feelings in ways that are healthier for us. Do you know there are 4 ways to respond to any feeling? Or that we can actually choose how we respond to our feelings? Most of the time we don’t consciously choose because we largely live our lives on autopilot.

It is our learned, habitual, response TO anxiety that has us biting our nails. Anxiety is not 'right' or 'wrong', anxiety is simply an emotion / feeling. There are a number of choices you can make in response to every single feeling you experience. But our ‘go to’ response on feeling the emotion we don’t want to feel e.g. anxiety, is to automatically and largely unconsciously have our fingers in our mouths and nibble.

Desire. We want to bite our nails. This can be a subconscious desire. We learned as infants that when we felt any discomfort, if we focussed on our nails we felt better. Thoughts like “I hate feeling anxious”, “I just want to feel better”, “I don’t want to feel the way I do” are desire thoughts. We want to feel differently than we actually are feeling in that moment. The desire to feel better is the primary cause of nail biting. When we repeat the same sentences over and over to ourselves, the desire becomes automatic.

We trained our brain to associate:
Any intense or uncomfortable feeling / emotion - we didn’t want to feel - WITH becoming focussed on our nails to distract / avoid the feelings. This helped us to feel better.

Discomfort + nail focus = feel better

Our instruction to our brain is:
When you detect any emotional discomfort - then get me to focus on my nails.

We did this long before we had the cognitive function that as adults, we now do. WE HAVEN'T CHANGED THAT MESSAGE. We wanted (desire) to be comforted and soothed. Biting our nails distracted us from the feelings we were having, it helped us to avoid emotions that we really didn’t know how to cope with. With repetition we created a Habit Pathway. Hundreds of thousands (100,000’s) of repetitions.

The Habit Pathway is deeply ingrained in our brain. BUT we only keep this pathway active by responding to the urge to bite our nails. Every time we nibble, we perpetuate and reinforce the habit. The good news is that our brains remain neuroplastic all our lives, so it is possible to change and de-activate this pathway at any time. However change itself does not feel comfortable - it takes consistent work to do this. Our automatic brain is going to put up up a fight as it thinks biting our nails is necessary for our very survival - that is what we taught it!

Catch 22

~ Because we sooth our anxiety by nail biting, when we remove our soother, we actually get to experience anxiety.

~ Our brain will now tell us something is wrong because we are not doing what we always do to solve for our emotional discomfort.

~ The part of our brain where our habits sit - will urge us, in a very compulsive way, to bite our nails.

~ Thinking and believing this message from our brain - that something is wrong - now triggers additional anxiety.

~ We heap anxiety on anxiety and intensify the very thing we don’t want to feel.

~ We hate the anxiety and want/desire relief from all the discomfort. Desire usually wins in the end.

This is compounded further when we use willpower resist urges. Resisting feels terrible. All our focus is on the thing we are trying not to do. This adds to the level of discomfort we experience. 

This is why attempts to stop nail biting using the 'resist urges with willpower' method - so regularly FAIL.


So this brings me to another Pathway - the Think-Feel-Act Pathway.

Our Thoughts create our Feelings

Our Feelings drive ALL our Actions.


It is our thinking that largely generates our anxiety in the first place.

It is our response TO the feeling of anxiety that has us biting our nails.


What if anxiety is just a normal part of being a human and nothing is wrong?

What if there is another way to manage anxiety?

What if it is possible to decrease the intensity of both urges and anxiety?

The answer is Yes.

We all have so much more power available to us in our lives, that we are not tapping into. By becoming more aware of our thinking. By connecting to what we are feeling. By choosing our response to how we feel, we can gradually become the master of the part of our brain that runs all the automatic functions and behaviours, rather than it’s slave. We are both the problem AND the solution.

To conquer any habit we need to change the instructions to our brain. We first need to discover what our current thinking is. And explore what the feelings are that we are running from.

Simply trying to change what we do (actions) whilst ignoring the thinking and feeling part of the Think-Act-Feel Pathway DOES NOT WORK. How many times have you already proved that using willpower to resist urges doesn’t work for you?

Changing our actions becomes easy and doesn't require willpower or resisting urges, when you address the Think and Feel part of the Pathway first. Change the desire first. When there is no desire, urges reduce. Not responding to any urge that persist gradually extinguishes them. No need to resist.


There is a better way to do this, I'll show you how. I figured out how to end my 50+ year nail biting habit, with relative ease once I addressed the root causes.