It made me

very satisified

How I did it: Since my last post in 2007 I more or less gave up on trying to stop this habit.  My family found it incredibly irritating and my wife started to pester me about it more or less constantly to no effect.

About 6 months ago, based on the theory that this was a mild case of obsessive compulsive behavior I asked my doctor about cognitive behavioral therapy.  He wasn’t impressed with the idea and recommended instead a low dosage drug that influenced the serotonin in my bloodstream.

After a few weeks (this is how long it takes to come into effect) I noticed that it affected my libido which was a show stopper for me.  

They say (and I think I noted this in a post before this) that if you can go for 23 days without doing something you can consider the habit broken. Today is day 49 of my not biting my fingers (yes it was a private New Year’s resolution that I took.

I was on holiday and it occurred to me that I needed to have the same level of disgust for the activity that my wife does.  I began to work on this elaborate thought experiment, imagining that biting my fingers was like a weird cannibalism and thinking to myself that it was like biting some small child’s fingers (I imagined doing it to a little child we met on holiday).  What I was doing was trying to build up in my mind a really strong negative image of doing this.

Since then I caught myself bringing my fingers up to my mouth quite a few times (and of course those incredibly irritating tags of hard skin and cuticles that triggered my biting).  Each time that has happened I conjured up these horrible images of eating dead human flesh and biting the fingers of some small child (graphic reminders of what I am doing to myself).

So far this has done the trick. I have some rough cuticles and tags of skin that ordinarily would have got me started that but I haven’t allowed them to trigger this again.  

I told my wife about it a couple of weeks ago (after 30 days) – she hadn’t really noticed but when mentioned it she realized that she hadn’t been saying “stop it” to me. Now I am starting to feel proud that I have beaten this thing.

Good luck to others trying this! It has been with me since I was 14 and that is a LONG time ago. Read how I did it… 15 months ago