Nice Nails

There was not rhyme or reason to it either. In good and bad times, in stressful and not so stressful times...I bit my nails down to the place where you can't go any further without being arrested or locked up. So, I was annoyed to say the least. Years of therapy, pharmaceuticals, failed attempts at stopping had finally given way to an insidious resignation: Until I had yet another midlife "crisis".

I am here to tell you that if you think you are getting older, you are...but life really does begin at forty. So, according to this nifty little formula, I am now only one and a half years old. Being the late bloomer that I have historically been, it wasn't until I turned forty-one that life began. It seems that life really begins when you realize that most of the good years are already over. It's time to get serious; it's time to get real.

One hundred and ninety-four days ago my life began. The lights came on. I began writing morning pages and discovered something which I call a CHOHWA. (Come Hell or High Water Activities). A CHOHWA is an activity that you commit to doing regardless of how you feel. You just do it. PERIOD!. And you do it once a day at about the same time, or Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. You decide. You pick. Then you stick to it.

In essence, it doesn't matter what the activity is. In my case I chose morning pages. Each morning I moved all my excuses to one side and sat down and wrote three pages of absolutely anything. There is no way to screw it up. Once I was writing daily, I realized that I could turn any activity, any action into a CHOHWA. You do this chosen activity period. The only exceptions are things like floods. If you are flooded out of your home, if a tornado comes along, if you are hit by lightning...well you get the picture.

You chose the activity for only one reason. You want to do it but you find that you have a number of handy excuses for not doing it. CHOHWA give you an excuse not to do this activity. It give you a really good excuse...Floods, tornados, acts of God. No other excuses are included. You know this in advance before you choose your CHOHWA. Be careful. Once you have decided on a CHOHWA you can't take it back easily. Remember, I am talking actual floods here, forty days and forty nights kind of thing.

So how did I stop biting my nails? I didn't. In fact, biting my nails was actually an addiction and I knew that stopping the behavior was highly unlikely. I decided to get rid of the nails in advance so that there was nothing to bite.

The next step was to make filing my nails a CHOHWA. I began to file them each morning (come hell or high water) guaranteeing that there was simply nothing left for my habit to bite. After about forty days, I filed them a little less short each morning, but I still filed them. After a while I had strong, healthy nails, for the first time in my life. During the whole time I never once tried to stop biting my nails. Over time they simply became too strong to bite. Success at last! Actually, I have been able to reduce my filing now to once a week or so, and still my nails remain out of my mouth and on the tips of my fingers where they belong.

I have no idea why I am writing about this. Maybe someone out there has the same problem and is trying to quite.

"What have you learned Dorothy?"

"Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!"

Preemptive sticks work.

Sometimes when you want an end result you have to find a way of doing something indirectly to get it. As long as I was focused on getting rid of the behavior I couldn't do it. Instead, I found a way to make the persistent behavior impossible. Now people actually comment on how nice my hands look and I learned that even habits that are thirty-five years old and seem impossible to break are not all that powerful after all. Get your own CHOHWA, and let me know how it goes. I can hardly wait to hear how you have finally out smarted those old persistent habits once and for all.