Trying To Break Small Habits
I tried writing about breaking this habit almost exactly one month ago when I was really on top of it, before things kind of fell apart and I was hit with the realization that there was still a fair ways to go.
I've been a really bad nail biter my entire life, but after many years of trying different strategies, I think I'm finally finding a strategy that's working for me and has gotten me further than I've ever gotten so far.
This is what my hand looked like at the beginning of November. My nails are LONG! It's so rare that I let my nails grow long enough that they pass the ends of my fingers, and seeing this gave me some special kind of euphoria I've never experienced before.
There were 2 main strategies people would suggest I took, and the most common one was to coat my nails with that shit that tastes awful. I don't know what it's called, don't know where to find it, didn't want to subject other people to it, so I figured maybe it was a solution for future Noé. The other most commonly suggested strategy was to just paint my nails, which was well within my means to do since I love having my nails painted and can get cheap nail polish easily.
Unfortunately I bite my nails when I'm stressing or when I'm thinking really hard, and programming for a living means I'm regularly doing both of these things. It also means that if I slip up for a moment, I can bite all my nails down to nubs before I realize it. It also ALSO means that I don't often have the time/space/brainspace to put aside 45 minutes where I can't use my hands while my nails dry, so especially after I've already started biting them, or the paint would chip off, it would just be a really long time before I would paint them again. I'd always think about it like "Oh, one of these days I'll get into the habit of painting my nails regularly...", but NO! The habit doesn't work like that!
What I really needed was to take advantage of some regularly occurring time that I already had to not be using my hands so that I could keep my nails painted regularly! At work we do one big standup call per week on Mondays and since I like to listen and pay attention to what everyone's working on, I figured I could just try to paint my nails during standup every Monday.
But that wasn't enough. I would often forget to do it until standup was nearly done, or I'd accidentally continue to focus on working in the background, but it didn't help its consistency. So I set up a Slack workflow to yell at me 1 minute before standup so that I couldn't clear that annoying little (1) icon until I had paint on my nails!
And this helped a TON. All through September and October I would take off whatever paint was still on my nails, and paint them again with a layer of nail hardener. I thought I'd solved it once and for all, my hubris led me to start writing this post with a very different tone, and I had to cut my nails with nail clippers for the first time in my life.
But unfortunately, I didn't realize the impact that taking vacations and having holidays on Mondays that removed the Monday morning video standup would have, and I forgot to paint my nails, kept being stressed and programming (in my free time) and I bit my nails to shit again. It felt pretty bad.
So here I am today. I have 1 more week of work before I'm off for 3 weeks, and I need to come up with a new plan to make sure I keep painting my nails without a regular Monday morning standup, else doing the game jam I'm doing this week and the holiday/winter stress is going to keep them short and in pain for another month.
Every time you reinforce a new habit, you undermine the one it's replacing. Sooner or later you cross a threshold and the new habit becomes the dominant one and any step backwards isn't as big as a continued step forwards. I feel like I'm on the brink of being able to cross that threshold, and I just need to come up with a solution for the 15% of the time that I won't be on a video call every Monday morning. I'm not terribly upset about the recent step back because I know they're part of the process, but after thinking that I had already crossed that threshold, the realization that I still have no strategy for making the time to paint my nails off the clock is definitely pretty sobering.
Honestly I need to be better about allocating more dedicated time to taking care of my basic human needs on my days off in general, so maybe this can be a means to initiate that. The real test of whether I'll have crossed that threshold will come once I take several weeks off in the new year and come out the other side with nails of whatever length and shape I'd like, and a bunch of stress managed and side project work put in!
I'll get there! It's a process, like all things are :)
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