Lip Biting Habit – The Psychology Behind Our Habits

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Lip Biting from this articles perspective is the constant chewing on the skin inside your mouth, often referred to as cheek biting or cheek chewing. This is a repulsive habit and like many habits can be very difficult to stop. This habit likely started out from feelings of stress or anxiety. It might also have started if you had a teeth brace and the metal would catch on the skin of your inner cheek and would tear a thin layer of skin off, not doing any real harm. However, this would mean you would roll your tongue over the lose skin and then want to bite it off. You use your fingers to push the skin towards your teeth and bite the excess skin away. Quite oddly, this is actually quite pleasurable and so you continue to bite more skin away.

Whether you are lip biting due to stress, anxiety or just perceived pleasure, you have created a relationship between the thought you are having and the action you take. You see, the mind and body are linked. The mind affects the body and the body affects the mind. If there is an outer situation that you feel to be dangerous or painful, your subconscious mind will trigger an emotional response. Your body will naturally tense up and then you will feel even worse. These automatic reactions and trigger responses are programmed from a very early age, perhaps when you were learning to walk and you kept falling over. You hurt yourself when you fell over and so you felt pain. This then created a relationship and neural-pathway in the mind.

Neural-pathways are elongated neurons in the brain that connect one side of the nervous system to the other. Basically they are created when we perform a task. The neural pathway gets stronger when we repeat the action. We perform a task for the first one or few times using our conscious mind (present thought mind) and then as we repeat it goes in our subconscious mind (auto-pilot mind). The action has become familiar and the subconscious mind takes over and acts on auto-pilot. The subconscious mind is where our habits are stored.

There is a relationship between the feeling of stress or anxiety, and the action you take when lip biting. This relationship is known as Pavlovian Conditioning. This was discovered and named after Ivan Pavlov, a famous Russian physiologist He would ring a bell at the exact time he would feed his dogs. Then after a while he would ring the bell and the dogs would come running salivating. This proves the relationship in the mind of an outside situation can affect the mind and can then affect the body’s reaction to that situation. This same concept is why when you feel stressed, you automatically start lip biting without you even knowing it. It is embedded in your subconscious.

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Source by Dave Kennedi

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