How to Stop Biting Your Nails (and Other Nervous Habits)

Hair pulling, skin picking, and knuckle cracking are just a few examples of pesky habits many of us just can't resist. Here are 10 tips to stop the snap, crackle, and pop of your body-focused nervous habits

By Savvy Psychologist Ellen Hendriksen

Join Our Community of Science Lovers!

Nail biting—as well as its close cousins hair pulling, skin picking, knuckle cracking, lip chewing, cheek biting, and other body-focused repetitive habits—usually happens without a conscious decision; instead, we discover ourselves with the aftermath—nubby nails, a lip callus, or an accumulation of inadvertently pulled-out hair.

Body-focused habits can begin at any age, but they usually begin in childhood and peak in the pre-teen years—around ages 11 to 13. But whether you’re young or young at heart, if your nervous habits are bothering you, check out these 10 tips to stop body-focused behaviors like going dental on your digits.

Thanks to listener Sylvie Daley of Marshfield, Vermont for asking how to stop nail-biting, which inspired this week’s topic.

On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

Tip #1: Don’t worry—it’s not an indication of some deep, dark, unresolved issue. Instead, there’s evidence that hair pulling, nail biting, and other body-focused behaviors have a neurological origin and are genetically based. Hair pulling, for instance, seems to run in families. It even goes beyond our species; animals like monkeys, cats, dogs, and mice sometimes overgroom.

Continue reading on QuickAndDirtyTips.com.

Subscribe to Support Independent Journalism

Great science journalism requires human expertise, time, effort and creativity. And it costs money. That’s why I and the journalists here at Scientific American hope you’ll join our community.

When you subscribe, you are supporting staff and freelance journalists who are passionate about telling science stories that are true, important and compelling. Our editors and reporters are often experts in their fields, which means they understand the nuances of big discoveries and can untangle the breakthroughs from the hype. With a subscription, you are also supporting rigorous fact-checking to ensure the words we publish are precise and accurate. And you’re supporting original illustrations, graphics and photos that bring you closer to an advanced laboratory, an ice sheet in Antarctica or a space mission in orbit. You’re helping us craft other types of high-quality journalism as well: Our newsletters are carefully written, edited and curated by staffers you have or will come to know and love. Our Science Quickly podcast is based on original reporting, collaboration with editors and scientists and exacting production.

Subscriptions keep this engine running so we can continue to deliver thoughtful, rigorous and independent science journalism to you. In an era of viral misinformation, this work is crucial. If you value what we do, I hope you’ll consider joining us as a subscriber

Thank you,

Jeanna Bryner, Editor in Chief, Scientific American