Focus Hand Notice Attention Biting Nails You  Back

CBT example:

You notice that you are biting your nails. You immediately focus your attention on what you are doing, and you focus all your attention on not doing it. You focus on the feeling of your arm going down, away from your mouth. ::do what?. 

Five minutes later, you notice yourself biting your nails again. You calmly repeat the procedure again::do what now?.

  No rage, no blaming yourself, no negative emotions.  That’s it. You can go back to whatever you were doing.

By doing this, you are training yourself to perform a new behavior – the “stop and put the hand down” behavior – which is itself triggered by the nail-biting behavior. As you go along, you will get better and better at noticing that you have started to bite your nails. You will also get better and better at stopping and putting your hand down. After a while, this will become semi-automatic; you’ll notice that your hand went to your mouth, a nail touched your tooth, and the hand went back down before you could do anything. Don’t stop training: focus your attention on the “stop and drop” part of the action.

After a while, the nail-biting simply goes away. Of course, the more complex and more ingrained a habit is, the more effort and time will be needed to break it. But for most people, even strong habits can be relatively quickly weakened, or redirected into less destructive behaviors.