Having finally quit the nail biting habit after 50+ years of discovering all the ways to fail to gain permanent mastery over this habit, it has become my passion to help others to finally stop too. The skills you learn in the journey of stopping this habit for good - to do it in a way that you are certain you will never do it again - are also translatable skills that will uplevel your life in ways you cannot imagine right now. This will be a blog about stopping nail biting, life from the perspective of an introvert and someone born with the highly sensitive person trait, gaining confidence, daring to dream, helping others, setting big goals, along with the hugely important arena of intentional mind and emotional wellbeing to thrive and be a fully alive human.

Do you bite your nails when you are anxious, stressed, bored or frustrated? Have you been biting your nails for most of your life? Do you want to quit, but don’t know how because you’ve tried everything and nothing works? Does the nail biting happen almost before you know it? Do you bite your nails despite your good intentions? Did people describe you as being ‘sensitive’ as a child?

If you knew there was a way for you to quit - what would you think about that? Do you just need someone to show you how to do it? Or have an example to draw from, to know it really is possible? Teach you the steps? Support you?

I’m Ann and I’m a Life Coach. I’d bitten my nails for longer than I could remember. Briefly stopped in my teens but started again and continued for 5 decades. It was only when I became a Certified Life Coach and looked at nail biting from a completely different perspective - mind management and The Model (more on this in other blogs) - that I understood the problem. Nail biting is so much more than a physical problem.

I know with absolute certainty that I will never bite my nails again as I have zero desire to chew them. I am now someone who no longer bites my nails. Imagine being able to think and say that for you too. I am not a special unicorn, neither are you, we are just humans with human brains that got programmed badly as children and need new software downloaded.

The use of the many products, gadgets and hacks to stop nail biting have unpredictable and variable results. The fact you are reading this may well be because you’ve tried many of them and failed? The physical answers to the nail biting habit only amount to 20% of the way to solve this. I came up with the figure of 20% from my experience of quitting nail biting, this is not a scientific analysis. It is an early step of a 5 stage process. The major part of the answer, the other 80%, is all to do with how our brain works and how we feel our feelings.

We buy into the idea, which the manufacturers of ‘products’ sell us on, that the answer to our problem is their particular gadget or product. It will be the magic bullet for us, it will be easy and do-able with this product. We won’t have to do anything, it will all be done for us with x, y or z. This is much the same as all the diet solutions that are available for being overweight. If a diet alone is sufficient to stop being overweight, then all of us would be as skinny as rakes, because there are enough products and solutions out there to suit everyone. A quick search of ‘how to stop nail biting’ reveals a lot of products, solutions, paints, false nails, stress balls, covers for fingers - etc. And we have tried a good number of them and failed, often multiple times.

The problem here is that we are putting all our trust in the external ‘thing’ doing the job for us and get disheartened when it doesn’t. We are putting too much emphasis on the product and paying no attention on why we bite our nails in the first place. We are asking a product to deal with what is only 20% of the issue, but expect 100% success. At best we combine product with willpower and wonder why we relapse or fail to quit. Our expectation is that we can delegate away the problem and have a product solve it for us.

Another issue is that we are all sold on the idea that it only takes 21-28 days to stop a habit and form a new one. So we are set up to use the product for 3 or 4 weeks, another high expectation, and deem the project a failure when we fail to quit nail biting on that time scale. We need to be open to the idea that to stop a habit that has been with us for most of our lives, it could take longer. I would suggest that a timeframe of 3 months or longer is more realistic. Not always the case, as we are only 1 thought away from transformation, but this is the exception rather than the norm. It will be individual. There are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ timescales. The result is what you need to focus on, not time.

In the early stages, yes, I do advocate using physical products such as the bitter tasting nail bite solution, but the reasons for doing this are very different to thinking of before. This is a tool to use in stage 1-2, which is simply to raise the awareness of when our fingers are in our mouths. We put our fingers in our mouth largely unconsciously, because we have done it thousands of times and because of this repetition, we don’t notice or recognise when we are doing it. The bitter taste makes us conscious that our fingers are in our mouth. That is the awareness raising. Then with that we get to deal with all the thoughts and feelings that arise.

The good news is that we are both the problem AND the solution. The answer isn’t in an external product. Product is a small but useful part of the solution.

I work with introverted or highly sensitive adults that have been nail biting for 10+ years, when stressed and anxious, who’d like to quit for good, but don’t know how. Via teaching and coaching online to help you stop nail biting in a way that can be permanent, when you work through the 5 stages.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. To get started on your journey to stop nail biting please sign up for my FREE guide below