If you have ever endeavored to quit your nail biting habit, you understand just how challenging it can be. Perhaps you have worn bandages or gloves over your fingertips, or tried flavored nail polish. Likely they were successful for a short time, but ultimately you found yourself with ragged nails and bleeding cuticles yet again.
The reason that a superficial nail biting cure is unlikely to work makes sense when the underlying cause for the behavior is investigated. The nail biting habit is chronic and parallel in nature to other stress-related mannerisms, like skin picking and hair pulling. Basically, these actions fill a natural urge; thus if the urge is not satiated or eliminated, the behavior will continue. No amount of bitter nail polish will curb the need for nail biting or offer the sense of relaxation you have after gnawing on your nails.
In that vein, you cannot actually cure nail biting, but do not fret: Thankfully, time-tested therapies that can help with recovery are available. There is a three-step treatment that can successfully stop nail biting if you are committed to do so. The fundamental step entails hypnosis.
For those unfamiliar, hypnosis brings to mind pictures of people watching swinging pendulums or barking on stage for the entertainment of others. Rest assured that at its source, hypnosis is simply profound relaxation in a trance-like state. A lot of people erroneously think that hypnotic trances are like sleep, but you are fully conscious and awake, simply extremely relaxed and amenable to suggestion.
In fact, a lot of us undergo some kind of self-hypnosis daily, during times when we disregard the majority of the distractions around us to focus on a particular task while remaining fully conscious. It happens easily while we daydream, watch television or read.
Because nail biting is stress related, the more effectively you can release and work through tension and anxiety, the more triumphant your move to stop nail biting will be. The top purpose of hypnotherapy is to afford you a way to preserve a state of relaxation always.
You are encouraged to research various hypnosis techniques, such as traditional hypnosis, Ericksonian hypnosis and Neuro-Linguistic Programming techniques, to improve both the state of relaxation and to accomplish a more complete sense of comfort. A competent hypnotherapist will know which method is ultimately best for you.
The following step to curbing a nail biting tendency is to become conscious of the action since nail biting is performed unconsciously. Hypnotherapy is very helpful for this stage, as communing with the unconscious mind to elicit the conscious mind’s knowledge that you are going to bite your nails can help very much. This allows you to make the choice to bite your nails. And since hypnotherapy has previously worked to ease the main stress, the significant impulse to bite your nails has been notably diminished, or even eliminated.
The conclusive step for using hypnotherapy to discontinue biting nails is to entirely remove the underlying wish to chew or bite. There are practices that can literally program you with an urge to renounce biting your nails; because just as behaviors can be quelled with hypnosis CD’s, they can be started.
Hypnotherapy CD’s are valuable for curbing behaviors like biting your nails because, even though the treatment will not miraculously produce absolute self-control, it can bolster your resolve and ensure that decisions you decide while in a relaxed state will still continue when you are agitated. Additionally, hypnotherapy can help you communicate with your unconscious mind to get it to support your conscious mind so both entities help with your target.
It should be noted that some likely hypnosis clients possess a worry of having ideas planted or of recalling "hidden" memories while in a trance. Rest assured that hypnotherapists are properly educated and accredited and abide by the most stringent professional and ethical rules. The techniques used by hypnotherapists to make valuable suggestions to your unconscious are entirely separate from the ones employed or used during memory recall or age regression. So the use of hypnotherapy for successfully curbing the drive to bite your nails will not lead to unintended memories or behaviors.
CONCLUSION: Nail biting is drive like any other, and strength of will by itself is generally not enough to eliminate the behavior. Using hypnotherapy or hypnosis CDs and all other resources available will more likely lead to a comfortable, successful end to your nail biting.
Alan B. Densky, CH has spent years helping thousands of clients with nail biting hypnosis. His hypnosis & NLP website offers tons of Free help including Free hypnosis videos, a hypnosis article repository, and a NLP blog where you can ask questions.
- Alan B. Densky, CH