on nail biting and weird techniques

I bite my nails. I don't like it, but nail biting has been a fact of my life for a very long time. At times I have been a light nail biter, only biting them when they grew past a certain length. At other times I have been an utterly obsessed nail biter, often biting till they bled. Right now I'm somewhere in the middle as I haven't bled for my nails in some time, but really it's a nasty habit and it really has to stop. I have tried to stop it by wearing band aids on the most damaged fingers, and that seems to stop the biting for the most part, but while wearing the band aid I pick at it constantly.

The working theory is that I bite my nails because I have a constant need to feel a texture with my fingers. Biting my nails grinds my fingers against my teeth, thus texture. My therapist came up with the idea that if my fingers were constantly feeling some other texture that it might lessen my interest in the nail biting. Thus my keyboard is now topped with braille keybord stickers. Now, I don't think I'm going to be learning braille out of this, but that each of the keys I touch has a slightly different texture to it seems to affect my interest in biting my nails. It hasn't wiped it out entirely, but I find myself with my fingers on my keyboard more often than being chewed upon.

It's difficult, for some, to admit that they cannot control every aspect of their lives. I am not exactly happy that I can't just stop biting my nails, but clearly I cannot simply decide to stop and I'm not too proud to admit that. It's much like being depressed; one cannot just simply stop being depressed at a whim so I would hope a depressed person would not let their pride stand in the way of getting help.

On the one hand it's kind of sad that I need to take such odd steps to try to retrain my brain, but on the other hand, I'm getting to experience some very strange things all in the efforts of gaining more control and normalcy in my own head. It may be weird, but it does lead to a very singular set of life experiences that few are like to match. Gotta take what you can get, no?