The one hack that finally stopped me biting my nails after 26 years.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a nail-biter.

I usually do it when I’m nervous or concentrating, and more times than I can count I’ve just bitten… way too far down. And it hurts. The skin around my nails is damaged and I’m the first to admit that having ridiculously short nails does nothing for my already chubby fingers.

It’s a habit I’ve always wanted to break, and have never been able to.

When I was younger, my mum bought that terrible tasting polish to put on your nails to try to make me stop. But it didn’t work. I’d just wash it off and keep biting.

I desperately wanted long nails, but my nail-biting wasn’t conscious. It was an instinct I felt like I couldn’t control.

Then recently, I accidentally came across a weird trick that interrupted my habit. And I haven’t bitten my nails since.

It started with a light blue nail polish. I saw it in Sportsgirl and bought it, even though I knew I couldn’t really pull off nail polish given I had no nails to paint. 

I sat down to paint my nails and decided to do a few coats – you know, so the colour wouldn’t chip off in literally five minutes. A few days later, I noticed I hadn’t bitten my nails. They weren’t long by any means, but they weren’t sore. It’s around this point that I’d usually start putting my nails in my mouth so that the polish would come off, and I could start the intense nail biting cycle again, but instead, I did something different.

I did another coat. And another one. And another one.

A few days later, I even painted my nails a different colour. Over the top of the old one. The result was having nails far too thick and far too painted to bite.

Several weeks later, my nails are so long they make that annoying clicky sound on my keyboard. It's all I've ever wanted.

I've painted them every few days, and only when they've started to get completely messy have I removed the nail polish and started again.

The only downside is that I ever-so-slightly resemble the recent Youtube craze of 'polish mountain', where people applied 100 coats of nail polish as a joke. 

Well, I'm not joking. I'm very serious, and to my other nail-biting friends out there - take my word for it. This works.