Feelings of stress or boredom may induce unwanted repetitive behaviors in some people. Although annoying, these self-soothing habits are hard to stop most frequently. A recent study suggests some easy self-help techniques to curb repetitive behaviors.
Body-focused repetitive behaviors are any repetitive self-grooming behavior that usually causes physical damage, based on the TLC Foundation for BFRBs. Nail biting, skin picking, hair eating, skin biting, lip biting and tongue chewing are some examples of them.
These behaviors may last for a lifetime in many individuals. Studies have shown that some people could have an inherited predisposition for habits corresponding to skin picking or hair pulling and the aspects corresponding to the person’s temperament, age of onset and stress triggers them.
Although cognitive behavior therapy, habit reversal training and comprehensive behavioral treatment can be found for individuals with BFRBs, nobody treatment is effective for everybody.
As a part of the newest study, researchers developed an easy habit-replacement technique to help individuals with these behaviors. The techniques involve calmly rubbing the fingertips, palm or back of the arm, a minimum of twice a day. You may learn more concerning the techniques on the Clinical Neuropsychology Unit’s website.
After a six-week study conducted amongst 268 individuals with BFRBs, about 53% of participants observed some improvement in comparison with about 20% in a control group. Individuals with habits of nail biting benefited probably the most.
“The rule is just to the touch your body calmly. If you happen to’re under stress, you may perform the movements faster, but not with more self-applied pressure,” said lead study writer Steffen Moritz, from the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany.
Around 80% of the participants were satisfied with the training and 86% said they’d recommend it to others, researchers said.
“I might say one-third to half of the patients with BFRB [body-focused repetitive behavior] profit from decoupling, but the remaining don’t. And so the concept was to seek out one other technique that is maybe more suitable for these nonresponders,” Moritz added.
John Piacentini, president of the board of directors of the TLC Foundation for BFRBs, hopes “the study will raise awareness of BFRBs because they’re really poorly understood, oftentimes misdiagnosed or missed completely.”
“There are reasonably good treatments on the market that almost all clinicians aren’t aware of or don’t do,” he added.
Published by Medicaldaily.com