Treating compulsive behaviors that target the body

Body-focused repetitive behavior (BFRB) is an obsessive-compulsive disorder involving physical actions. For example, you might be a severe nail-biter. Constantly picking at your skin and pulling hair out of your head are also behaviors you just can’t seem to stop, even though you hate the way they affect your appearance. Between 14 and 60 percent of adults suffer from body-focused repetitive behaviors, but how do you actually stop them?

What is body focused repetitive behavior?

BFRB is behavior in which you compulsively perform certain actions on your body. This includes nail-biting, skin-picking, and pulling out your hair. This behavior can prevent you from functioning properly socially or emotionally, and you may even become so preoccupied with it that it undermines your productivity.

Most people don't suffer from this, but if you find that your pulping behavior is causing you to be unable to process emotional events properly or do everyday things, you do have a little problem.

Typically, BFRB is treated when it compromises your physical health, such as when you completely break your skin or when it really severely affects your quality of life. BRFB is often chronic and can recur throughout your life, even after treatment. So it is a fluctuating condition.

What causes BFRB?

Compulsive behaviors related to the body can be genetic. Research shows that people who suffer from BFRB often have immediate family members who also do so[1]. There are also other factors that come into play, such as character traits, your environment, family stress and age of onset.

Many people think this behavior is the same as self-mutilation or that there is often a deeper problem that needs to be solved. This deeper problem is sometimes a cause, but it has not been scientifically proven that a deeper emotional problem and BFRB are linked.

In doing so, it is also not a way for people to punish themselves like many people who engage in self-mutilation. However, it is a way for people to get satisfaction from feeling and reduce stress.

What treatments are available for BFRB?

Currently, BFRB is primarily treated with cognitive behavioral therapy and strategies to stop the behavior. The initial goal is for those affected by this condition to become aware of it the moment they are engaging in the behavior. Mindfulness, for example, can be used for this purpose. Mindfulness is also used to stop compulsive behavior, and there are other ways to change compulsive behavior as well.

For example, if you’re a skin-picker, you’re encouraged to clench your hands into fists or rest them in your lap when you feel the urge to pick. It’s therefore important that someone you care about then gives you a compliment for this, so that you have a positive experience when you resist giving in to the compulsive behavior.

Keeping a journal to find out compulsive behavior triggers is also recommended. When you become aware that you are engaging in your compulsive behavior write down when it happens, what you were doing and what you were thinking about. By keeping track of this for a while you will naturally start to see a trend if it is certain behaviors or thoughts that cause those fingernails to just never get a little long[2].

This also helps you determine whether it’s boredom or stress that’s causing you to pick, bite, or pull at your skin. Unpleasant emotions and thoughts can also be identified as triggers, and then the key is to learn how to deal with these emotions and unpleasant thoughts—not by suppressing them through compulsive behavior, but through healthy thought patterns and acceptance of these kinds of unpleasant emotions. Everyone experiences this.

Can hypnosis help?

Hypnosis can certainly help you suffer less from pulling your own hair, nail biting and picking at your skin. In fact, hypnosis has an effect on reducing stress and it helps change behavior.

When you’ve kept a journal to identify triggers and discover that stress, boredom, or certain emotions cause you to engage in compulsive behaviors involving your body, that’s something hypnosis can help with. What you do when you’re bored, stressed, or experiencing certain emotions is actually tied to your beliefs about how the world works.

Emotions and stress are your reactions to events and how you interpret them based on your beliefs. Hypnosis can help you identify and change unconscious beliefs, so that you either experience the emotion less intensely or feel less stressed. It can also help you deal with boredom in a different way.

There are several ways in which hypnosis can uncover these beliefs. The most commonly used method is regression. Through regression, you go back to the moment when your subconscious mind formed a belief that now causes you to experience compulsive behaviors involving your body in response to certain events or emotions.

Because many beliefs originate in childhood, those beliefs need not be logical. By giving you this insight, much can already be done to reduce BFRB.

Less stress through relaxation

Relaxation exercises are also recommended to help reduce the compulsive behaviors that lead to nail-biting, picking, or hair-pulling. Hypnosis often begins with relaxation, and that relaxation can be deepened through a guided visualization of a pleasant place or symbols that make you feel good.

To begin with, you relax through hypnosis by focusing on your breathing. You breathe in and out calmly through your abdomen. Next, you relax your muscles. This can also be done with a mindfulness body scan, and the relaxation of the muscles can also be guided by the hypnosis expert. You then close your eyes, either before or while relaxing your muscles. This helps prevent distractions during the guided visualization.

In that visualization, the hypnosis expert helps you imagine a place where you relax completely and how some elements in that place help you experience deeper relaxation. Heat from the sun can be used through this, but other symbols can also be important during such a guided visualization. Such as fresh water or energy or certain colors that remove negative energy from your body and bring that positive energy. For this, the hypnosis expert will first have a conversation with you to find out important symbols in yourself to use in the guided visualization for relaxation.

Hypnosis to change behavior

Hypnosis is used in various situations to change behavior. For example, hypnosis can help with quitting smoking and even with drug addictions. Hypnosis can therefore also help with these compulsive behaviors.

In the case of addictions, hypnosis makes the addictive behavior something you find repulsive, causing you to quit. Because addictions are often also a way to suppress stress and negative emotions, this can also help with compulsive behavior.

Another way hypnosis can help reduce BFRB is with post-hypnotic suggestions. These suggestions are a type of command for the behavior you have after hypnosis. For example, it encourages you to perform replacement healthy behaviors when you normally go back to picking.

Usually the post-hypnotic suggestion is given after a guided visualization. For example:

"You're at work and you have to meet with your supervisor soon. You are reading up and normally before you know it you are biting your nails again. This time, while you're reading, hold your hands in fists on your lap and deliberately relax them every so often. This will keep your nails beautiful and because you are busy relaxing you are more relaxed and confident during the interview."

This is just one example of post-hypnotic suggestion. Depending on your compulsive behavior, cause and solution to deal with it in a different way, the post-hypnotic suggestion may differ.

The some hypnosis techniques you also get to take home. For example, suggestions and guided visualizations are often recorded so you can listen to them at home during self-hypnosis. This enhances the effects of the hypnosis sessions and keeps you effective longer.

Would you like to learn more about exactly how hypnosis works and how you can use it to help yourself or others? Then join the free online masterclass where you’ll learn the basics of hypnosis.

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Sources:

[1]https://www.bfrb.org/learn-about-bfrbs/treatment/causes-of-bfrbs

[2]https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/touchy-subject/201903/how-treat-body-focused-repetitive-behaviors