If you know someone who is a nail-biter, or if you're a nail-biter yourself, then you will want to read why you may be doing this specific behavior and what it means for your overall health.
Some consider nail-biting to be pretty harmless, but there are actually some health issues that go along with it.
According to WebMD, nail-biting can lead to a variety of consequences entailing shame-induced deformation of your fingernails, weakened teeth over time, and unfortunately can lead to certain infections of your nails.
These are but some of the many reasons why psychotherapists are trying to help patients overcome this kind of behavior in their personality.
Now, you may be thinking to yourself that there is no possible way that you are going to get any of those ailments if you continue nail-biting.
However, it's probably a good thing to know why you even do it in the first place, right? Instead of describing this as some kind of nervous habit of yours, it's actually an indication that you are an organizational perfectionist.
Published in the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, which states this:
"We believe that individuals with these repetitive behaviors may be perfectionistic, meaning that they are unable to relax and to perform tasks at a normal pace," said study author Dr. Kieron O'Connor. "They are therefore prone to frustration, impatience and dissatisfaction when they do not reach their goals."
Essentially what this boils down to is that people don't exactly bite their nails from being nervous, but instead they bite them from being extremely frustrated.
In order for the researchers to even reach these results, they had to study 48 individual participants in the study. Half of them were reported to have had these kinds of repetitive behaviors, such as nail-biting.
The study entailed the subjects filling out a variety of surveys that were created to test their organizational behavior as well as their emotion regulation.
The conclusion that the researchers came up with from the study, had whittled things down to nail-biters being some of the most organized perfectionists in the world.
What does this mean exactly? Well, it means that if you're a nail-biter, you become easily frustrated from your tendencies of over-planning, over-working, or being frustrated from the lack of activity going on in your life right now.
Of course nail-biting helps in that moment in time; however, you do not think of the long-term damage you are causing your nails by doing so.
Hopefully this has given you some insight into the world of a nail-biter. This information is here for anyone that would like an explanation to their repetitive habits in hopes of fixing themselves and avoiding long-term impacts as described.
source and courtesy: higherperspectives.com