What motivates any human to do anything? Why do we do what we do?

It is desire.

Desire is what motivates us.

There are 2 ends of the spectrum:

    1, the desire to want, to move towards

    2, the desire to not want, to escape, to move away from.

Desire starts as a THOUGHT.

This Thought creates an Emotion / a Feeling in our body.

That feeling drives all our Actions.

Desire to me seems a powerful alchemy of Thought and Feeling. Sometimes the Thought is more powerful, sometimes it is the Feeling that seems stronger.

Ever woken up in the morning, fully alert, leapt out of bed and feel very inspired to take action. You have a rocket up your tail and nothing will stop you?

It is a thought that did that. A powerful Thought which created a powerful Emotion / Feeling in your body. You desired either the outcome from taking action or how you anticipated the outcome would feel to you.

Conversely those mornings when you wake up feeling unable to get out of bed - there is either something on your day you are not looking forward to / dreading or there is nothing special on your calendar to jet propel you out of bed.  

So to bring this around to nail biting - What creates your desire to bite your nails? Ever asked yourself what the benefit of nail biting is to you? Believe it or not, there is a benefit of nail biting to you. You wouldn't draw blood and tolerate all the soreness, if there were not an upside to chewing your nails.

It can be a powerful exercise to take an A4 piece of paper and:
1, Fill 1 side up with all the benefits, the upside of biting your nails.
2, Fill the other side with all the negative impacts of biting your nails.
Include all your Thoughts and any Feelings you can identify. Along with all the financial, emotional and health impacts (positive and negative).

At first your brain is probably going to resist the idea, think this is a stupid exercise.
It will probably be easier to fill out the negative impacts than the positive impacts, so start there. 
Take your time to do this.
Initially give yourself 15 minutes per side.  
Keep your pen moving.
Tell your brain it does know and keep asking - what else, what else, what else?

Magic happens when we take control of our brain and give it a specific task to do. Watch how you will feel urges to do all sorts of other things, tasks that seem suddenly very urgent, instead of doing this exercise. Your brain may not want to do this - listen to all the excuses and chatter in your head about this.

There is an upside to biting your nails otherwise you wouldn't do it!

Understanding the benefits to you of biting your nails will give you a deeper understanding of why you continue -when a part of you really wants to end this habit. Write down at least 3 benefits of nail biting to you, before you allow yourself to stop the exercise.

The main reason you continue to bite revolves around how you feel in the moment you comply with the urge to bite and whilst you are in the act of biting. This is so often 'Relief'. Or Feeling 'better' than you did.

The number 1 reason you continue to bite, despite all your good intentions, is because it provides you with relief from how you were feeling just ahead of biting. So what are the top 3 feelings you are trying to escape from / not feel? The number 1 feeling for many is anxiety or stress. But it can be any number of other feelings / emotions.

The Feeling I was so often experiencing just ahead of biting my nails, was boredom. I discovered that I didn't want to feel bored. I used my nails to escape boredom. So often I was just biting my nails automatically and didn't recognise that boredom was what I was actually Feeling. I didn't know this until I started toast myself these questions. Up to this I thought nail biting 'just happened' and 'I had no idea' why I found myself with my fingers in my mouth again.

Because we bite our nails rather than Feeling our Feelings, we never get to learn any other way to deal with our Feelings other than have the reflex response of fingers in mouth and nibbling. The habit has been automated to our Primitive Brain and does happen on auto-pilot!

Our Feelings and the Thought that created the Feeling in the first place is why we Do or don't Do everything in our life. 

Our Thoughts create our Feelings
Our Feelings drive our Actions

Every Action we take or fail to take is down to this.

To overlook this simple fact is to fail to understand how we as humans, function.

So sad then, that we are not taught this. All too often we are afraid of our Feelings. We get taught that the aim of life is to be happy as much of the time as possible and that something is going wrong when we don't feel happy. We then become anxious when we think something is wrong, which heaps a negative Feeling onto whatever else we are Feeling. We desire 'happy'. We desire to not feel negative emotions. 

We taught ourselves as infants how to escape feeling uncomfortable - we learned to bite our nails as a way of distracting and avoiding emotional discomfort. We continue to do this as adults. The nail biting habit is so automated in our brain as adults, we are very often unaware that this is what we are doing - we are escaping how we Feel. The crazy thing is that we thought the Thought that created the Feeling in the first place. All this is within our control when we become conscious of what is going on. This is where Coaching comes in. It takes awareness to catch ourselves doing this. So many of our Thoughts and Feelings are on repetition. We are familiar with these habit loops and just think it is 'normal' because it is our normal.

So the long and short of the nail biting habit is that we create the Action of nail biting because of the way we Think and Feel. Trying to change the habit by changing our Actions is unlikely to work long term. No wonder we have so many relapses.

To change our nail biting habit requires a deeper understanding of what is actually going on.

We also need to generate a strong desire / motivation to to change the status quo. We get to do this with our mind - we create Thoughts that generate the Feelings that will get us through the discomfort of change. We focus on the long term result rather than the instant relief, that keeps us stuck in the habit.

This work also means we need to be willing to actually feel what we are Feeling, rather than running away from our Feelings and using our nails to escape stress, anxiety, boredom, frustration etc. Do you actually know what your triggering Emotion / Feeling is?

The true work of ending nail biting is also the work of connecting with ourselves more deeply. It changes the relationship we have with ourselves and our nails. On the back of this it is possible to get to a point where there is no Feeling that we are unwilling to Feel. This is magic. When you get here, then what else are you capable of doing?

If you are ready to finally stop nail biting then I can help you. Sign up for the free Guide to get on my email list and discover more.