A Real Nail Biter: 4 Unexpected Lessons on Breaking Bad Habits

Shame didn’t help. Pain didn’t either. Love, health, and resolve were not enough to keep me from biting my nails. But I write to encourage you. Bad habits are breakable and good habits are make-able.

But not how I thought.

To listen to this post, check out the Keep On with Abigail Wallace podcast.

I’ll explain how I kicked my habit in a minute. But first a little background.

A Real Nail Biter

I’m 37 days into breaking a 40-year-long bad habit.

I cannot remember a time when I did not bite my nails. In grade school, I would keep my hands out of sight because it embarrassed me when curious classmates would gasp, “You bite your nails?”

In high school, I dismissed my stubs as a function of being a farmer’s daughter—I milked goats after all— and an active athlete.

I cannot remember a time when I did not bite my nails. My dad bit and I’ve heard nail-biting has a genetic link, or maybe I learned it subconsciously from watching him—epigenetics and all. In any case, I do not blame my dear dad.

When girlfriends got gorgeous manicures, I assured myself I was saving much-needed college funds by “keeping” my nails short. I put my habit on hold the last month of college. Because the last month of college was the month before my wedding and I wanted tat hand-over-hand photo with brand new wedding bands. So I mastered myself long enough to avoid wedding-photo disgrace. Just long enough to avoid nubs.

I liked those tidy nails that could lift a dime or open a can. I did not want it to end.

But it was only just a question of when. Three weeks after the wedding, when grad school began I was back to nubs.

I had whittled them down again.

A Matter of Love

Oh, how I tried to break that habit. I tried and tried and tried. I tried all “5 Hacks to Stop Biting” but none worked for me. Neither the chemical-tasting polish, nor the more natural jalapeño, were bitter enough to break me of my bad habit. I’d pucker and bite right on. Carrying a nail clipper in my pocket wherever I went also didn’t work. It wasn’t enough. 

Nothing worked. Strengthening polish and a manicure from a kind friend did not deter me. The polish only pushed me to “groom” my nails more. The book by the anonymous Stubbs Nomore taught me a thing or two about my bad habit, but it did not rid me of it.

Another book called “Stop Your Nailbiting” hailed the power of pairing an aversive stimulus with a problem behavior, say a thin rubber band snapped on a tender inner wrist at the first sign of nail biting, which I learned from the book is officially called “grazing.” My wrist got raw and red.

But I did not cure myself, easily, quickly or permanently. The pain wasn’t enough. 

Grace for the Fails

But I found some good in the humbling. In fact, the humbling is a good, because God gives grace to the humble. In my failure, I grew in empathy and mercy for those who could not break their harmful, self-destructive habits. I felt comradery with alcoholics who went back to drink and smokers for a toke. I know how it feels to do what I do not want to do. There is grace for lapses too.

So I prayed and resolved and looked for new power to overcome.

What about love? Was the power of love strong enough to break bad habits?

Bad Habits Block Love 

How, you ask, would breaking my nail biting habit be an act of love?

Great question. For starters, one can’t give a good back rub with nubs. Not even to the husband one loves. One can’t scratch a son’s shoulder or open an aunt’s soda.

Stubs block love.

By that description, nail-biting is also an addiction. For addictions are habits that keep us from showing love. Nail biting impaired my ability to love. And the greatest of these is love.

But even that revelation wasn’t enough. Nothing was enough. I’d resolve and fail and resolve again. I want to be buoyant, so I didn’t give up.

But no resolve stuck—no good, prayer-bathed, present-your-request-to-God-with-thanksgiving resolve stuck. Nor did a let-go-and-let-God approach. Not a single one of the “6 Tips to Stop Biting” worked.

And, yes, I know: Nothing will work if you don’t.

But even when I did work, when I bought the aversive polish and plucked the rubber band, even when I humbled myself and asked my friends for accountability, even then I couldn’t break the habit. There were days I would have three Band-aids around my fingertips to cover the bloody stubs. 

Even when I meticulously filed and trimmed each night with the “Ultra cuticle trimmer” my hopeful friend Lisa bought me, I failed, I lapsed, I bit.  

So that’s what didn’t work. But what did?

Bad Habits, Good God

But God did. God gave me an unexpected gift. Every good gift is from our good God. The God who breaks the pow’r of canceled sin and sets the pris’ner free. The God who raises the dead. God, who is at work in us to will and to act according to his good purposes. That God. Our God. 

Thirty-seven days ago, when our family went west for a week, my nails were not in my thoughts. But on the way home, I scratched an itch. I mean scratched with a sharp fingernail not rubbed with a fleshy nub. And I noticed my fingers didn’t look so raw, and a crescent of white crowned each tip.

And I liked what I saw.

The desire to bite is (mostly) gone. But this freedom did not come with my plan or a new hack. There was no accountability partner or fresh resolve. God simply broke in and interrupted my lifelong bad habit. God gave me that gift.

He has done it. I have received it—his love, his gift. For what do we have that we did not receive?

A (Recovering) Nail Biters Habit-Breaking Takeaways 

Here are three habit-breaking hacks that didn’t work for me and the one that did, I think.

1. The fear of disappointing my husband again, the embarrassment of showing my stubby, bandaged fingers at work, and the shame of failing was not enough.
2. But positive reinforcement wasn’t either. My husband’s delight at seeing my pretty hands, the reward of a manicure, and my pleasure at seeing the whites were not enough.
3. Nor, as I’ve explained earlier, was committing my cause to God. Even with prayer and caring Christian sisters to hold me accountable, I kept right on biting.

What worked?

I hesitate here, because I am not prescribing. There is no fool-proof, habit-breaking formula.

There is no fool-proof, habit-breaking formula.

While new environments can help break us bad habits, and distraction can shake off what binds us, they don’t always. My nails today are a gift from God. Period.

But he may have made the mountains and canyon hikes his means of grace. He may have used a week hiking in Grand Teton and Montana to break my bad habit. He may have shown me more of His glory to set me free.

I absolutely think he did.

But it wasn’t in the least because of me.

Take Heed

But I am torn. I almost didn’t share this story because a big “what if” is niggling at me. Because this post might be premature.

What if I lapse and bite? What if you see me next week and my fingers are not crowned in white?

If that happens, I want you to know that the lapse was in me, not in God. My job now is to take heed.

“Therefore let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall” (1 Corinthians 10:12, NASB).

In the end, this is not a list of hacks or a how-to guide. Rather, it is my testimony to the goodness of God.

From Morn to Night, My Friend

But more, It is a call to you who are burdened by bad habits that, as yet, you have been unable to break. It is my call, after 40 years of failure, to keep on hoping in the Lord who does all things well, and at his time, and in his way. I commend to you the first stanza of Up-Hill, a poem by Christina Rosetti.

Does the road wind up-hill all the way?

   Yes, to the very end.

Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?

   From morn to night, my friend.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be “over it.” I may be a “recovering nail biter” to the very end. Last night as I sat writing this there was a lull and without thought, my hand went t my mouth.

Breaking bad habits may take us the whole long day. I might be in recovery, and you might too, the whole long day. And that’s all right.

Because our God is with us, to will and to act, and sometimes he does that when we least expect it, and in the most surprising ways.

As long as we are young we set so much importance on our own efforts, whereas often, if we will just do nothing but listen quietly to what God has to say to us, we shall find that He sets us thinking and mending our faults by a quiet way which looks as though it had nothing to do with it; and then, when we come to about where our fault used to be, we find it gone, imperceptibly as it were, by our having been strengthened in another direction which lay, though we did not know it, at the real root of the matter.
— Henrietta Kerr, Joy & Strength, 8/2023

How did you break a bad, unhelpful habit? I’d love to hear. God works in so many wonderful ways.