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A person who bites his nails does not look very attractive. Many understand this, but still cannot resist the temptation. The fact is that with the help of such obsessive actions they try to drown out an acute sense of dissatisfaction.
Many people think that biting their nails or pulling their hair is a sign of anxiety. But perhaps the driving force behind this habit may not be repressed anxiety at all. Today, there is growing evidence that compulsive (compulsive, repetitive) behavior arises from feelings of dissatisfaction and associated feelings of boredom and annoyance. Psychologists at the University of Montreal (Canada) suggested that the need to torment your body also accompanies perfectionism, the belief that we cannot afford imperfection.
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To test this hypothesis, the researchers selected 50 people who reported their addiction to various kinds of compulsive actions – pulling out eyelashes, biting nails or skin on their hands. (The control group included those who did not have this problem.) Participants were asked questions about how often they felt bored, angry, guilty, irritated, and anxious, and how strongly these emotions manifested. Then each participant was placed in a situation that, according to the experimenters, should have caused various experiences – stress, relaxation, frustration or boredom. For example, to induce boredom, a person was left alone in a closed room for 6 minutes.1.
Participants who were prone to compulsive behaviors reported a strong urge to act when they felt stressed or irritated. But this did not happen when they were relaxed. “A common cause of compulsive repetitive behavior is dissatisfaction,” explains Professor Kieron O’Connor, lead author of the study. “People who frequently bite their nails or pluck their hair often exhibit the same conditions. They are impatient, prone to boredom or quickly become frustrated. It is difficult for them to do rhythmic work, it is difficult to relax. As a result, such people are more prone to frustration, impatient and irritable, especially when they fail to achieve their goals. All this, like boredom, is a feature of perfectionism.
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The authors of the study believe that with the help of obsessive behavior, our brain releases unused energy. “The tension that doesn’t get released is redirected to ourselves and what’s around us,” says Kieron O’Connor. “Therefore, such people not only hurt themselves, but can also tear off pieces of paper, break pens and pencils, tear threads out of clothes. The positive (in some ways) side of this habit is the ability for the brain to stimulate itself and regulate emotions. Compulsive actions bring a welcome sense of reward – for example, when a person manages to pull out another hair. It must be remembered that this behavior always replaces a constructive action that did not happen, did not succeed.
What to do about compulsive behavior when it becomes a serious problem? According to Kieron O’Connor, there are two possible ways to solve this problem. The first is replacing a habit with a competing but harmless action with the same effect (eg, placing objects on a table, solving a Rubik’s cube). The second is a split approach that focuses on dealing with the causes of tension, such as perfectionism itself and other negative attitudes. One way or another, if you notice during a meeting that your nails have become too long and ugly and need to be shortened urgently, do not fool yourself – it’s not about them.
1 Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, vol. 46.