HOW I USED MINDSET TO STOP BITING MY FINGER NAILS
THE PAST
I've had a nail-biting habit for as long as I can remember. It has always been labelled as a "bad habit" and there has always been a lot of shaming (from myself and others) whenever I was biting or picking at my nails.
I would presume that I picked it up as an anxious habit but some of the worst times, when it has felt out of my control have been when I was reading a good book or watching a tense TV show. I would subconsciously pick at my nails and chew them and before I knew it I had chewed them down to the point they were painful.
I feel like I've tried it all to beat this habit. I used the bad tasting stuff you brush on them, I got fake nails and I've had regular manicures. But I got used to the bad taste, fake nails destroyed my natural nails so when they did grow out they broke instantly and even regular manicures didn't stop me from picking and chewing at my nails when I was anxious (or reading a good book).
The closest I've come to properly stopping the habit has been a few times when I did a "Days without biting my nails" counter. I would put it on my fridge and keep track every day of how long it had been without biting them to inspire me to keep going. This only ever lasted about a month and I think that's when I was out of will-power and just defaulted back into the old habit.
SHIFTING MY MINDSET
When I started learning more about shame, I realized that my nail-biting habit is something I'm ashamed of. Worse yet, throughout my life, various people have shamed me for biting my nails. Well-meaning comments and criticisms were supposed to inspire me to stop the habit or make me take notice of the fact that I was biting them.
Unfortunately, combined with my perfectionist mindset these comments resulted in me feeling a lot of shame and deciding that nail-biting made me not good enough. Shame is a challenging emotion to navigate and often I would just do my best to forget about my nails to avoid feeling bad about them. This meant that I experienced underlying shame 24/7 about my nails and did everything in my power to hide my nails whenever possible.
This past summer I realized that maybe I was tackling overcoming this habit the wrong way. I decided to rephrase my habit as growing my nails instead of stopping biting them. This came from the idea that to "stop" something can make us feel lacking, while "growing" is more abundant. It's easiest explained when in the context of people who want to "lose" weight, we are programmed to not want to "lose" things so it can be hard to see the good in the objective. By thinking about my intention from the mindset of growing my nails, I started to think more positively about the whole experience.
The main hurdle I had to overcome before it was possible for me to start growing my nails was to realize that there was nothing wrong with the fact that I had short, stubbly, unattractive fingernails. This was a tough one because for so long I had used this bad habit as evidence that I was inadequate in some way.
This shift goes both ways though. I had to realize that in growing my fingernails, I wasn't going to become any better than I already am. This kind of goes with separating my worth from my actions (previously posted about). By making my fingernails a more neutral presence in my life I could begin to disassociate the shame I felt from biting them from the state of my nails.
This took time to sink in and by no means was a belief I changed overnight. One strategy that helped speed up the process was to take a photo of my fingernails every day for two weeks. Initially, this was part of a challenge to see if I could track the progress of growing them, however, I kept biting them for the whole two weeks and didn't see any progress. What did change though was my reaction when looking at the photos. I stopped shaming myself and labelling anything wrong with the photos. Instead of looking at my disgusting, short fingernails they just became pictures of my nails.
Towards the end of November, I started painting my nails and set the commitment to start growing them out. I still experienced the anxious habit of picking at my fingers, however, with nail polish on I shifted this habit to scratching the polish off. I ditched any idea that this was a waste of the time I put into painting them or the cost of the polish, and instead let it be an outlet that was a step better than chewing or picking at my nails.
MY SUCCESS
I've now been growing my nails for almost 3 months and have had to trim them many times.
I've shifted my identity: I'm not the kind of person who bites their fingernails.
I have had to have a lot of patience during this journey and it has put my perfectionist mindset to the test. It can be very frustrating once you put the effort into changing your mindset and the results aren't there right away. I knew how long it had been since I had stopped biting my nails, but my nails initially were not nice looking by any standards. Because I had been biting them for so long they grow frail and abnormally.
Every time I scratched my polish off I had to set aside time to re-paint them. My polish scratching tendencies have decreased and now I only scratch at my nail polish when they've chipped already.
I've let it be okay that I haven't mastered this new mindset perfectly. I still pick at my cuticles sometimes and my polish only lasts a few days before needing to be re-done. Someday I hope to have strong, beautiful nails that don't need to be painted nicely for me to resist picking at them, but for today the journey so far has been good enough.
