For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a nail-biter.
I usually do it when I’m nervous or concentrating, and more times than I can count I’ve just bitten… way too far down. And it hurts. The skin around my nails is damaged and I’m the first to admit that having ridiculously short nails does nothing for my already chubby fingers.
It’s a habit I’ve always wanted to break, and have never been able to.
When I was younger, my mum bought that terrible tasting polish to put on your nails to try to make me stop. But it didn’t work. I’d just wash it off and keep biting.
I desperately wanted long nails, but my nail-biting wasn’t conscious. It was an instinct I felt like I couldn’t control.
Then recently, I accidentally came across a weird trick that interrupted my habit. And I haven’t bitten my nails since.
It started with a light blue nail polish. I saw it in Sportsgirl and bought it, even though I knew I couldn’t really pull off nail polish given I had no nails to paint.
I sat down to paint my nails and decided to do a few coats – you know, so the colour wouldn’t chip off in literally five minutes. A few days later, I noticed I hadn’t bitten my nails. They weren’t long by any means, but they weren’t sore. It’s around this point that I’d usually start putting my nails in my mouth so that the polish would come off, and I could start the intense nail biting cycle again, but instead, I did something different.
