Maybe habit-forming
When I was a kid, my mom always insisted on “cleaning” out my ear canals with cotton swabs, usually right after I bathed, and this ended up establishing a bad habit of using cotton swabs on my ears every morning after I shower. I am well aware of the many problems this can cause but I never feel like I’m quite done getting clean until I’ve swabbed my ears out. I’ve tried breaking that habit many times but it’s always come back.
I’ve also found it very difficult to establish a daily habit of flossing my teeth, even though that’s super important to dental hygiene, and arguably even moreso than brushing. I’ve tried things like keeping a bag of daily flossers/floss picks by my computer, which has helped somewhat, but it’s still not gotten to the point where I feel comfortable telling my dentist, “Yeah, I floss!”
So, for the last couple weeks I’ve been trying something: I put a bag of floss picks on top of my box of cotton swabs, and now after I shower, when I reach for the cotton swab, instead I am reminded that I should floss my teeth, not my ears, and so I floss my teeth instead.
As a result I haven’t swabbed out my ears in a while (they still feel “dirty” all morning, unfortunately), and better yet, my teeth have remained consistently flossed. Of course it would be better if I could get myself to floss at bedtime (rather than having dinner stuck between my teeth all night) but any daily flossing is better than no daily flossing, and so this is still a huge improvement.
I feel like this could apply to any habit you want to break where there’s another, better habit you can replace it with: make it slightly harder to do the bad habit in a way that reminds you to do the good habit instead. However, I’m not sure how to apply this to another really bad lifelong habit I’ve struggled to break, namely biting my nails, often to the point that they bleed or get infected, and which is also not great for my teeth!
I’ve tried a few different things, like always having nail files and buffing pads on-hand as an alternative to biting and also reducing the jagged texture that causes me to start needing to “fix” my nails to begin with, but that still requires conscious effort as an alternative. I’ve also tried doing the nail polish thing, but every nail polish I’ve tried either uses a solvent that gives me an awful fibromyalgia flareup, or is basically just a weak pigment that does nothing to dissuade me from biting anyway. Press-on nails also seem like they’d be a source of sensory problems, not to mention being single-use plastics and also generally too long to let me keep playing piano or guitar. And then bittering compounds don’t work either; as a kid I would often wake up with a strange taste on my fingers which I just got used to, and much later when the whole “tasting Switch cartridges” thing happened I tasted one out of curiosity and let’s just say the flavor was quite familiar. This made me realize that my mom must have been putting bittering compound on my fingers when I slept, without letting me know that this was intended as a reminder to not bite my nails.
(Note to mom, if you’re reading this: Maybe with consent it would have been more effective.)
The suggestion of “wear a rubber band around your wrist and snap it when you catch yourself biting your nails” also isn’t super effective for me, as I’m already giving myself pain or other sensory junk when I realize I’m biting my nails enough that I’d have the presence of mind to snap the rubber band, and the pain from overbiting is already worse than what a rubber band would cause anyway.
So anyway, I’d welcome other suggestions for trying to break my nail biting habit.