Biting your fingernails can be embarrassing and painful. There likely are germs on your fingers, too, that you'd rather not be putting in your mouth. Hypnosis is one method to treat a nail-biting habit. Consulting a certified hypnotherapist may be necessary if you have an extreme compulsion, but you can try purchasing a book or an audio CD to guide you through self-hypnosis. Certified hypnotherapist Mark Stein suggests an NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) process that may break your habit in as little as five minutes.
Step 1
Close your eyes and visualize yourself biting your nails. Then, change the picture to one of yourself sitting comfortably with a relaxed look on your face and your hands resting in your lap, says Stein in the article "Stop Biting Those Nails... in Five Minutes" on Hypnosis.org.
Step 2
Increase your focus so this new mental picture becomes clearer, brighter and more intense--as if you upgraded to watching this picture in high-definition. Imagine clearly the color and shapes.
Step 3
Hold the image of the new you in your mind and place next to it the old image of you biting your nails. Make each picture the same size. Imagine your nail-biting self dropping your hand away from your mouth and walking into the new picture.
Step 4
Make the new picture of you not biting your nails expand as quickly as you can imagine it. Let the new picture push away the old picture of you biting your nails. Stein says it is important that the new picture takes the place of the old picture by pushing it out of your mind at a fast speed. The success of the NLP process depends on speed.
Step 5
Bring the two images back into your mind of you biting your nails and you not biting your nails, side-by-side. Expand the new picture once again to take the place of the old, but even more quickly this time. Do not sacrifice the clarity of your pictures for speed.
Step 6
Repeat Step 5 at least three more times, each time speeding up the process. Be sure to open and close your eyes between each try, as recommended by Stein.
Tips and Warnings
- This process may be used at any time in your life when circumstances may encourage you to bite your nails again. It may need to be employed a week later to reinforce the change or it may not, but it doesn't hurt to give your subconscious a tune-up. Nail biting is a stress-induced unconscious behavior, which is why NLP can work better than using a rubber band or bad-tasting nail polish, according to Alan B. Densky, certified hypnotherapist, in the article "Hypnosis and NLP Can Break The Nail Biting Habit."
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