I had a bad problem with biting my nails when I was nervous, anxious, or just bored. My nails would be stubs. They would occasionally bleed from how chewed up they were. I never realized how annoying and gross that seemed to others when I saw someone else do it in my class. Biting nails is just one habit that many teens have.

Bad habits are part of our daily lives, and they are hard to break out of. Most of the time, we don’t realize we are doing it; they are an involuntary act. Every individual person has their own involuntary act, like nail biting, lip chewing, picking scabs, tapping pencils or fingers, cracking knuckles, and many more. Even though these habits are completely normal to us, to others they may be abnormal and can come across as quite annoying and weird. This can cause issues and disturbances in daily lives.

These habits can be distracting, not only to ourselves but to others around us. For example, imagine you are sitting in a class taking a test while coming up with an answer you are tapping your pencil on the desk. This might be helpful to the individual doing it, but can be annoying and very distracting to others. Most of these habits can be time consuming. While in class a person should be doing their class work, but instead you’re staring off into space biting your nails and not paying attention. This can cause a few issues due to not getting work done and wasting time when this time should be spent getting things done.

These involuntary acts can be hard to control due to the person not even realizing they are doing it. The consistency of these acts that are abnormal, strange and annoying to others can be the source of teasing and bullying. Even though these acts are totally normal to to the individual it can be considered strange.  Since these habits are considered weird to others they are considered annoying and at some points inappropriate. People will begin to tease and ridicule the individual about it which can lead to self conscious issues and begin to cause people to feel embarrassed. This causes issues for the people with the act because they can sometimes feel like something is wrong with them.

There are a few ways to breaks these habits; for example, I would find something to distract me or clean something so I would get the urge of bitting my nails off my mind. Another idea is to find a stress ball and squeeze it when I had the urge to bite my nails. A good way to stop the habit of tapping your fingers that worked for me was to chew gum. Chewing gum also worked on the habit of lip chewing as well.  

The things is that everyone has their little bad habits whether it be biting nails, lip chewing, or anything of the sort, it’s not abnormal to us, but to others it is.