With most physical habits, the underlying causes may be quite varied, and at different psychological levels. While hypnosis has a wide range of applications, the ailments that are most directly related to physical habits tend to be the ones that can be treated with hypnosis most quickly and directly.

Smoking cessation is the most well known of these, and is one of the more successful and less invasive techniques for achieving its goal.

Another popular area for hypnosis treatment is for weight loss. Similarly, hypnosis is also the best technique for conquering the nail biting habit.

Nail biting shares many similarities to smoking. It is a physical, ritualistic habit. Either may be caused by the mechanics of a simple physical routine, or maybe symptomatic of deeper psychological problems. And in either case the habit itself can be very effectively stopped with hypnosis.

Discovering and resolving underlying psychological problems which manifest themselves in nail biting or smoking can be a process that requires multiple sessions with a skilled consulting hypnotist. Not all hypnotists and consulting hypnotists are capable of working at the deep psychological level. Thankfully, for the purposes of eliminating a smoking or a nail biting habit, they don't need to work below the most direct physical level.

The more immediate goal of finding a nail biting cure is far more straightforward. Many of our deeper emotional and psychological states are impacted by our physical state, so in solving the physical symptoms directly, we can also have an indirect impact on deeper issues. Also, not all negative physical habits have underlying causes; sometimes it is truly just a physical habit; it just "feels" good for the person to take part in them.

In my experience, the relaxed and focused state of hypnosis can achieve nearly miraculous results when it comes to achieving simple physical state changes. Whenever I eliminate severe burn pain, remove nausea, and solve other physical symptoms for a client in mere seconds, it still amazes and surprises me, even though I'm supposedly the one with the "power" (although as we know, the true power lies in the client's unconscious mind). The capabilities exist in each of our minds to block severe pain and nausea; so the ability to prevent one from biting their nails is a relatively modest goal in comparison.

I have found three of the powerful aspects of hypnosis to be association, substitution and anchoring. With association, one can link the undesirable behavior to something truly unpleasant; with substitution, one can replace the bad habit with a harmless one; with anchoring, one can link physical movement triggers with alternative feelings and behaviors.

With association, just like the simple hypnotic parlor trick can make a piece of white bread taste like the best New York Cheesecake to a subject, one can make the taste and feeling of nail biting to be extremely distasteful. If your subject consistently and repeatedly is conditioned that the taste and feel of nail biting is very unpleasant, it will help the habit to disappear.

There are chemical products that achieve this goal via unpleasant tasting nail polish. However, with a mental association they can stop nail biting without relying upon consistently applying a chemical product. This "aversion" type of therapy can be very helpful. But it is only reliable when used as an adjunct to eliminating stress that causes one to bite their nails, as well as extinguishing conditioned responses (unconscious associations), which triggers one to bite their nails.

With substitution, it can be very effective to replace the nail biting habit with a more benign habit. For example, it is very effective to place the suggestion that whenever one feels the urges that lead them towards nail biting, they will instead take a deep breath, and exhale slowly, achieving all the same feelings and resolution that nail biting used to bring. I have found the deep breathing substitute to be very effective for a wide variety of ailments.

Anchoring similarly can be used to subvert one action into another, and works well with the association and substitution. It is useful to create the suggestion that each and every time a subject sees their fingers coming to their mouth, they strongly remember the bad taste association, and that they instead take that deep breath to resolve the tension.

In summary, hypnosis has been proven as one of the more successful techniques for negative habit modification. Just as with smoking cessation, the techniques and concepts outlined here prove to be very effective as a long-term nail-biting cure.

Alan B. Densky, CH is an NGH certified consulting hypnotist and NLP Practitioner. He has been helping clients with stress and stress related symptoms like nail-biting since 1978. He offers a comprehensive seven session program based on Ericksonian Hypnosis and NLP to quit nail-biting.