Fingernail Factors

Right now, the political news verges on hysteria with candidates up and down, sometimes both in the same day, leaving anxious voters biting their nails. In Manhattan, there are three Democratic primaries to fill a retiring member’s seat but happily things are calmer for incumbents with only two, Congressman Dan Goldman and State Senator Kristen Gonzalez, facing a primary. That’s a real good thing because fingernails are not food.

In fact, your nails like your hair are made of keratin, a protein that is “dead” when the nail (or hair) grows out which is why it doesn’t hurt to cut either one. But in this case, dead doesn’t mean useless. Your nails protect finger and toe tips richly supplied with blood vessels and nerves. As a result, they enhance your ability to feel what you touch and move things while preventing viruses and bacteria from slithering into your body.

According to several studies at Weill Cornell right here in Manhattan, as many as three in every ten of us habitually bite their nails, a practice known medically as onychophagia from the Greek words for nail and eating. New York Presbyterian/Cornell University psychologist Rachel E. Ginsberg labels that our most common way to cope with stress or anxiety. No surprise then that last year the British Medical Journal published a number of Chinese studies showing nail biting more common in people with ADHD and tic disorders. The problem also seems to run in families with as many as 63 percent of children age three to 21 reportedly able to name at least one relative in the same situation.

Like other soothing habits such as pulling you hair or chewing the inside of your cheek which the American Psychiatric Association classifies as obsessive/compulsive disorders, the nail thing is hard to end. Happily, Tara S. Peris, an associate professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at UCLA has some hints.

Her first suggestion is “awareness training” which means keeping a journal of what happens when you feel the need to chew. The idea is to identify a behavior pattern you can interrupt before it reaches its obvious end. Her second suggestion: Find a competing response, like pinching two fingers together until the urge to bite passes or maybe even changing the place where the urge is most likely to hit, moving to one where it hasn’t. Third, find a different way to soothe your stress, even something as simple and seemingly silly as Dr. Ginsburg’s suggestion to “trace circles in the air with your hand.” Or you could get up and go for a walk.

In the end, if these acts don’t do the trick there’s always your Mom’s old reliable one: Paint your nails with nail polish. The liquid contains denatonium benzoate which Wikipedia describes as “the most bitter compound known.” Concentrations as miniscule as 10 measly parts per million are unbearably bitter for humans which is why it is also used in denatured alcohol (ethanol with additives that make it unpleasant to drink), antifreeze, animal repellants, liquid soaps, and shampoos to prevent accidental poisonings. And it’s painted on to Nintendo game cards to keep kids from chewing and swallowing them.

Now go have some ice cream to reward yourself for working to leave your nails in peace instead of pieces.