What exactly is nail biting?

Growing up I always seemed to bite my nails. It was just a habit, and I never realized that I was even doing it. My moms always use to scream at me for it. She would threaten me with all different types of things like no desert or coal for Christmas. I really did try to stop but it was a habit that I could just not break away from. I began to wonder what exactly is nail biting. Is it an addiction? Habit? My mom always said that nail biting resulted in bad things but I didn’t understand exactly what.

Nail biting or, onychophagia, is a habit that someone does to relieve his or her stress. People mostly bite their nails during puberty, with around 45% of teen nail biters. A higher percentage of girls bite their nails rather then girls. If one doesn’t stop biting after puberty they usually do by the time their 22. Adults rarely bite their nails. People are still not sure what exactly the science is behind nail biting. Although it’s considered a habit, it is also an impulse control problem or obsessive compulsive disorder. An impulse control problem is caused when a person can’t resist their urge to do something. A person usually becomes tense that leads them to preform their habit, which results in a guilt later on. People who have impulses don’t necessarily want to do it, but they feel like they have to. The longer the person does it, the worse the disorder gets. Scientists have tried to figure out why people have disorders and believe it is because of emotional, psychological, or biological influences. The limbic system, which is the part of the brain, which deals with emotion and motor systems. If someone is upset or experiences anxiety the limbic system is the part of the brain that controls it. This leads to people trying to find a way to relieve stress and for many people that is nail biting. There is also a big relation between OCD and nail biting. With both of these, there is compulsion and the need to do it. Although they are very similar there are a few differences. For example, someone with OCD wants to do it because they are scared of the negative effect later if they don’t. People who bite their nails don’t want to do it, but they don’t even realize. During a test at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, scientists observed a mouse that couldn’t keep his paws of his face or ears. Just like people, the mouse couldn’t stop what it was doing and was diagnosed with a form of OCD.

Everyone has different beliefs for why people bite their nails. Many people believe it’s because of a person’s mother. People blame it on a mothers personality, getting overfed as a child, long breastfeeding, or a having a bad relationship with their mom. Anxiety is another popular belief. Science shows that people who have anxiety “self mutate” themselves as a way to distract and take out their nervousness. Although anxiety can be the cause of this when scientists observed people who had the nail biting habit even when the people felt most relaxed they still bit their nails without even realizing it.

Nail biting hasn’t been a topic studied much in science, which I find is very surprising since it’s a major issue for people. People need to dig deeper to find out the root of nail biting. There are many experiments that can be done to see what exactly causes nail biting. For example, maybe the food we eat causes us to bite our nails. Maybe people who eat crunchy foods resort to nail because it feels normal. Or maybe the time of the day or the country we live in. I know that biting my nails is still a huge problem for me. To stop myself I try to get manicures as much as possible because it makes me stop from biting them. There are also a lot of jells that someone can put on that taste bad when the nail goes into the mouth which can cause someone to associate bad taste with biting. I’m still looking for a cure, but is there really anything, maybe even a medicine?Unknown-1

Work Cited

http://www.webmd.com/anxiety-panic/tc/nail-biting-topic-overview

http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/10/01/161766321/nail-biting-mental-disorder-or-just-a-bad-habit

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140710-why-do-we-bite-our-nails

http://www.calmclinic.com/anxiety/symptoms/nail-biting

 

4 thoughts on “What exactly is nail biting?

  1. Pingback: Break 5 Common Nervous Habits | Long Island Pulse Magazine

  2. Bowen Wang

    The first thing came up to my mind was LeBron James. Actually several of my friends have been biting their nails ever since I know them. I never think any health related facts caused by this behavior. Your article led me into lots of interesting things regarding nail bitting.
    The first very interesting thing I found related to nail bitting is that it actually may be related to perfection. When it comes to nail bitting many of us are naturally related to anxiety, while the fact may be actually due to they are just perfectionists. Doing so helps them “soothe boredom, irritation and dissatisfaction”. There is a recently study on 48 participants have just proved this theory. Even though to me a 48 participants experiment may not a very creditable resource to look up to, while it at least indicates some potential relationship in between perfection and nail bitting.
    Secondly, as you mentioned in the article, nail bitting might be one of the little things that we may should consider get rid of if we wish to improve our health conditions. It is said in one of the article I found online, as linked below, that as long as we do not hurt the nail bed underneath our nail it will not interfere with fingernail growth. While it still remains a health risk such as may cause damage to the skins around the nail, the damage to your teeth, so on and so forth.
    After doing these research and read though your article I will definitely let my friends to consider stop bitting their nails in the future since it does not seems help their health condition.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPhVrFSOBBg
    http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nail-biting-may-arise-from-perfectionism/
    http://www.shape.com/lifestyle/mind-and-body/10-terrifying-reasons-stop-nail-biting-good
    http://www.webmd.com/beauty/nails/stop-nail-biting-tips

  3. Caroline Maria Teti

    I do not bite my nails, but know a lot of people that do. What stood out to me the most in your blog post is that nail biting can be blamed on a your mother. How does overfeeding or long breastfeeding cause one to bite their nails? I can understand a bad relationship – because that can cause stress and many individuals will bit their nails when he or she is stressed out.

    I wonder if it would make sense to do a study where mothers are asked about the duration of their breastfeeding a child and then ask the child [separately] if they bite their nails regularly? This may end up being a conclusion of a meta-analysis. Do you think that type of study would be too vague?

  4. Shannon Rose Beam

    I’ve always bitten my nails ever since I was a kid. In your post you mention that girls are more likely to bite their nails than boys, I find that interesting considering my brother always bites his nails as well. Maybe we both do it because it’s genetic. I also agree with you when you say that people that bite their nails don’t even want to do it and half the time they don’t even know they are doing. I feel like there are many third variables that affect nail biting such as stress and nervousness. I found this interesting article on Huffington post about nail biting, definitely check it out! http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/13/nail-biting-nervous-habits_n_6854152.html

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