Tips to Stop Biting Nails

Basically, nail biting is a compulsive habit. Medically, it is known as Onychophagia. It can be found both in children as well as adults. It mostly starts when children are around 10 years of age and usually they outgrow it by the age of 20-22 years. However, some people may continue to bite nails even after the age of 30. Some of the key causes are stress, anxiety, nervousness, boredom, etc. Children often develop this habit after watching adults doing the same. Since it is a compulsive habit, most people are not even aware when actually they put their fingers in their mouth. Basically, the tips to stop biting nails that are given in this article will simply make you more conscious that you are about to bite the nails. Thus you can resist the urge to bite them.

How to Stop Biting Your Fingernails?

The nail biting habit is not going to be easy to quit. You have to make persistent efforts before you can see some results. Here are a few tips:

Tips #1: Stop biting nail of one finger of each hand at a time. On the first week, you are free to bite the nails of other four fingers of the hands. On the second week, exclude another pair of fingers. After few weeks, you will be able to bite only one nail on each hand. This way you can reduce the urge to bite the nails gradually which makes quitting the habit easier.

Tips #2: Keep your hands busy. You get a strong feelings to bite the nails when your hands are free. If you keep them busy, you do not get the scope to bite your nails. Activities like writing, painting or squeezing stress balls are very helpful to keep your hands engaged.

Tips #3: Cover up the hands. Wearing gloves or putting bandage or stickers around the nails are the best ways to keep the hands under cover. As a result, when you put the fingers inside your mouth, you will not be able to bite your nails.

Tips #4: Apply nail polish. There are specially formulated nail polish available in the local pharmacy stores that can be used for this purpose. They have a bitter taste and are colorless. So, men can also use them. Apply it generously on the cuticles several times in a day. Every time the finger is in your mouth, the bitter taste of the solution will remind you that you should not bite it.

Tips #5: Reduce mental stress. If you keep a record of the time when you feel maximum the need to bite the nails, then you will find that you often do so when you are under stress. In other words, you bite the nails just to release your mental tension. So, learn some techniques to keep the stress in check and you can abandon the habit more easily. Yoga, meditation, deep breathing are some of the relaxation techniques which have been proved to be highly beneficial.

How to Stop Nail Biting in Children?

The techniques of curing nail biting that are effective of adults may not work for small children. Here are a few helpful suggestions that can encourage children to stop biting nails:

• Trim their nails regularly so that they do not get any extra nail to bite upon.
• Children who bite nail tend get an instinct to chew something. To control this, give them some sugarless lollipops or any other food that they can munch. Thus they will forget to chew their nails.
• You must have noticed that they mostly bite their nails while watching TV. During this time, give them some notebooks or drawing books to scribble upon. When they are busy with such activities they will forget about biting nails.
• Talk to them about the health effects of nail biting. Tell them how broken nails can give them pain. This will encourage them to avoid biting nails.
• To stop nail biting in children, never punish them. This will frighten them even more and they are likely to indulge more in the habit.
• When they successfully do so shower them with lots of praises. This will boost their self-esteem.

Treatment stresses upon the need to reduce the instinct of biting the nails. With continuous practice, the impulse goes down and eventually the habit fades away.