If you have ever attempted to curb your nail biting habit, you realize just how difficult is. Perhaps you have put on gloves or bandages over your fingers, or tried bitter-flavored nail polish. Maybe they were successful for a short time, but ultimately you found yourself with ragged nails and torn cuticles once again.
The reason that a topical nail biting cure is unlikely to work makes sense when the underlying cause for the behavior is investigated. The nail biting habit is persistent and parallel in nature to other stress-related activities, like skin picking and hair pulling. Fundamentally, these actions meet an innate longing; thus if the urge is not eliminated or satiated, the behavior will continue. No amount of bitter nail polish will curb the need for nail biting or bring the sense of relaxation you feel after gnawing on your nails.
In that vein, someone cannot actually cure nail biting, but do not be concerned: Thankfully, time-tested therapies that can help recovery are available. There is a three-step course of action that can efficiently stop nail biting if you are committed to do so. The most important step entails hypnosis.
For the uninitiated, hypnosis conjures images of people watching swinging pendulums or barking on stage for others' enjoyment. Rest assured that at its base, hypnosis is simply deep relaxation in a trance-like condition. Many people wrongly think that hypnotic trances are like sleep, but you are awake and fully conscious, simply very relaxed and amenable to suggestion.
In fact, a lot of people are subject to some type of self-hypnosis daily, during times when we ignore the majority of the distractions around us to concentrate on a specific task while remaining fully conscious. It transpires effortlessly while we read, daydream or watch television.
Because nail biting is related to stress, the more effectively you can work through and release anxiety and tension, the more triumphant your hard work to stop nail biting will be. The most important target of hypnotherapy is to help you to sustain a relaxed state always.
You are encouraged to investigate numerous hypnosis approaches, such as traditional hypnosis, Ericksonian hypnosis and Neuro-Linguistic Programming techniques, to boost both the state of relaxation and to realize an improved sense of happiness. A qualified hypnotherapist can tell which choice is ultimately best.
The next step to curbing a nail biting tendency is to become sentient of the action since nail biting is done unconsciously. Hypnotherapy is effective for this stage, as communing with the unconscious mind to activate the conscious mind's awareness that you will soon bite your nails can help deeply. This allows you to make the decision to bite your nails or not. And because hypnotherapy has previously aided to ease the related stress, the significant need to bite your nails has been notably diminished, or even removed.
The last step for using hypnotherapy to discontinue biting nails is to completely eradicate the primary craving to bite or chew. There are techniques that can actually program you with an impulse to give up biting your nails, because just as habits can be effectively quelled with hypnosis, they can also be started.
Hypnosis CD's are effective with restricting behaviors such as biting your nails because, even though the treatment will not suddenly produce absolute self-control, it can fortify your steadfastness and make certain that decisions you decide during a hypnotic state will still remain when you are agitated. Furthermore, hypnotherapy can help you commune with your unconscious mind to get it to support your conscious mind so both entities adhere to your objective.
It is noteworthy that some potential hypnosis clients have a worry of having ideas planted or of experiencing "hidden" memories while in a trance. Rest assured that hypnotherapists are formally skilled and accredited and adhere to the rigorous ethical and professional rules. The techniques used by professionals to make beneficial suggestions to your unconscious are entirely separate from those employed or used during memory recall or age regression. So the use of hypnotherapy for efficiently ending the compulsion to bite your nails will not lead to unintended behaviors or memories.
CONCLUSION: Fingernail biting is a compulsion like any other, and using strength of will only is generally not enough to quit the behavior. Using hypnotherapy or hypnosis CDs and all other resources available will more likely lead to a successful, comfortable end to your nail biting.
With the majority of physical habits, the underlying causes may be quite varied, and at different psychological levels. While hypnosis has a wide range of applications, the problems that are most directly related to physical habits tend to be the ones that can be treated with hypnosis most quickly and directly. Smoking cessation hypnosis is the most commonly recognized of these, and is among the more successful and less invasive techniques for reaching its goal. Another common area for hypnosis treatment is for weight loss. Similarly, hypnosis is also the best technique for conquering a nail biting habit.
The nail biting habit has much in common with smoking. Both are ritualistic, physical habits. Either can be caused by the mechanics of a simple physical routine, or might perhaps be symptomatic of deeper psychological root causes. And in either case the habit itself can be quite effectively stopped with hypnosis.
Discovering and resolving underlying psychological issues, which are exhibited in nail biting or smoking can be a process that necessitates numerous sessions with a skilled hypnotherapist. However, not all hypnotherapists and hypnotists are capable of performing at the deep psychological level. Fortunately, for the purposes of eliminating a smoking or a nail biting habit, they are not required to work below the most direct physical level.
The more immediate goal of curing nail biting is far more straightforward. Many of our deeper emotional and psychological states are impacted by our physical state, so in solving physical symptoms directly, we are also able to indirectly impact deeper issues. Also, not all negative physical behaviors have underlying causes; sometimes it is simply just a physical habit; it just "feels" good for the person to take part in them.
I have seen that the relaxed and focused state of hypnosis can achieve nearly miraculous results when it comes to causing simple physical state changes. Whenever I relieve severe burn pain, remove nausea, and solve other physical problems for a client in mere seconds, it still surprises and amazes me, even though I am supposedly the one with the "power" (as we know, the real power exists in the client's unconscious mind). Our minds have the capacity to block out severe nausea and pain; so helping to prevent one from biting their nails is a relatively modest goal in comparison.
I've found three of the strongest aspects of hypnosis to be association, substitution and anchoring. With association, one can link the undesirable behavior to something very unpleasant; with substitution, one may replace the bad habit with an innocuous one; with anchoring, one may connect physical movement triggers with alternative feelings and behaviors.
With association, just like the simple hypnotic phenomenon can make a piece of white bread taste like the most delectable New York Cheesecake to a subject, one can make the feeling and taste of nail biting to be very distasteful. If your subject is consistently and repeatedly conditioned that the taste and feel of nail biting is very unpleasant, it will help eliminate the habit.
There are chemical products that achieve this goal via unpleasant tasting nail polish. However, with a mental association they can stop nail biting without depending upon using a chemical product. This "aversion" type of therapy isn't generally very helpful. But it is reliable only when used as an adjunct to eliminating stress that causes one to bite their nails, as well as extinguishing conditioned responses (unconscious associations), which triggers one to bite their nails.
With substitution, it can be very effective to replace the nail-biting pattern with a more benign behavior. For instance, it is very effective to place the suggestion that whenever one feels the impulses that lead them towards nail biting, they will take a deep breath instead, and exhale slowly, achieving all the satisfaction and resolution that nail biting used to bring. I have found the deep breathing substitute to be effective for a wide variety of issues.
Anchoring similarly can be used to subvert one action into a different one, and works well with the association and substitution. It is useful in creating the suggestion that each and every time subjects see their fingers coming to their mouth, they vividly recall the unpleasant taste association, and they take a deep breath instead to resolve the tension.
Hypnotherapy has been recognized as one of the best techniques for negative habit modification. Just as with smoking cessation, the techniques and concepts outlined here prove to be very effective as a long-term nail-biting cure.
Alan B. Densky, Ch has sinced written about articles on various topics from Lose Weight, detox diet and Health. Alan B. Densky, CH has spent years helping thousands of clients . His. Alan B. Densky, Ch's top article generates over 2740000 views. to your Favourites.