204: Willpower will NEVER work but THIS does

You've tried time and time again to "just stop" picking, pulling, and biting at your body.

But if willpower were really the solution, something would have changed a LONG time ago.

So either you're a broken human being with no hope of ever feeling better or living better...

Or you're simply going about this the wrong way.

The first one we fear to be the truth. The second one is the actual truth.

The problem is not that you are a fundamentally flawed human being. It's that you've misunderstood how your brain works, why you engage in this behaviour, and what it takes to heal from it.

And to be fair, you haven't really "misunderstood"; you've been misinformed or haven't yet had guidance from someone who deeply understands the intricacies of what you're going through.

That absolutely makes things harder. No wonder you feel stuck!

It's time to remedy this and share with you what you're really searching for when you pick, pull, and bite at your body so that you can finally move forward in a way that lasts.

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My name is Raffaela Marie. I'm a holistic BFRB coach who has healed from 15 years of chronic skin picking myself and dedicated my life to helping driven women do the same. Through my podcast, free resources, and programs, I teach strategies to overcome urges, build emotional safety, and expand into authenticity. My approach goes beyond quick fixes, focusing on root causes and long-term recovery.

Transcript

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Willpower does not work against chronic skin picking or hair pulling or nail biting, and it never will. Because willpower and the urge to engage in these behaviors comes from two separate parts of the brain. To put it really simply, the urge to pick or pull or bite comes from the emotional part of our brain. And willpower comes from the logical part of our brain. And our emotions are much stronger than our logic. Everything we do is ultimately driven by emotion. This is why you can logically know something might be good for you, but you can't seem to get yourself to do it or to stop doing it. So let's unpack this today. What is really going on in your brain so that you can understand it better? Stop blaming yourself and actually start to move forward. Because I see this all the time. We judge ourselves for our brain just functioning exactly how it should, and it keeps us stuck for years. There's a better way to go about this. Welcome to episode 204 of Beyond Skin Picking and Hair Pulling. This is where you can come to learn how to address the root cause of why you pick, pull, or bite at your body so that you can finally make long-term sustainable change. I am your host, my name is Raphaela Marie. I struggled with chronic skin picking for 15 years, uncovered a holistic and science-based path to healing from it that addresses the root cause. And now I'm here to share everything I possibly can with you so that you can heal as well. If you appreciate this podcast and the work that I do, please do leave a five-star review, hit like and subscribe. Also, let me know in the comments what you think of this episode. I'd love to hear from you. Let's first start with addressing what skin picking, hair pulling, nail biting, what these behaviors are actually doing, what's their purpose? And maybe you've heard this before. They are a self-soothing mechanism. And the term self-soothing can be a bit misleading because these behaviors can maybe have small moments where they kind of feel good, but generally they're not that soothing. They actually make us feel worse about ourselves. So let's give it a better definition. They are coping mechanisms, but what they actually do is squash your emotions. They suppress your emotions because you're feeling something, and maybe that thing is getting a bit much. It's getting too much. And so your subconscious goes, How do we know how to deal with this? Oh, we'll squash this emotion down. I don't know how to process this properly. I don't actually know what to do with this emotion. All I know to do is to suppress it so that it feels a little more manageable. And engaging in chronic skin picking or hair pulling or nail biting, going into that zone and that flow, it's kind of like scrolling on your phone for half an hour, an hour. When you finally put your phone down, your brain feels fried because it's overstimulating. With both behaviors, you are overstimulating the dopamine, the reward system in your brain, which makes us less sensitive, more numbed out to our body. We feel a bit disconnected. I wonder if you've noticed when you spend way too much on your phone, you feel a bit irritable. It's harder to really be present and connect with people. I've definitely noticed that for myself. The more aware I've become of it, the more I've noticed what an impact it has on how I connect, not just to other people, but also myself. It's harder to feel into my body. And that's because that's exactly what these behaviors are trying to help us do. They're trying to help us to suppress and squash emotion. And overstimulating our brains and exhausting them is a pretty effective way to do that. But why do we do this? Why does our why has our brain chosen these really unhealthy ways to squish emotion? Like, yes, okay, I didn't maybe learn how to healthily manage anxiety, and so I blame myself for it. I talk about that kind of thing in so many different episodes. At the root cause, where is this coming from? Why do we carry all this suppressed emotion? What I want to talk about is why does our brain handle it in the way that does now? And like I said at the start, it's because this behavior comes from an emotional part of our brain. It comes from the amygdala. And the amygdala is not the only part of the brain that is to do with compulsive addictive behaviors, but just for simplicity's sake, I'm gonna stick with this one part of the brain. Now, the amygdala, if you're not yet aware, it is responsible for our safety. This part of our brain as well does not have any concept of time. There is no yesterday or tomorrow. There is no in a few minutes or an hour ago. There is only this exact moment. And so whatever behaviors are driven from this part of us, they don't give a shit about the consequences. Then it that part of our brain isn't even aware there are consequences. Not even aware of the concept of consequences. A different part of our brain entirely is responsible for that. And so when we get stuck once again in a really bad picking session, we're like, I know this is so bad for me. I know how this is gonna feel. The reason why you keep doing it is because it's coming from a part of your brain that has no concept of those things. It doesn't care about those things. It just cares about you feel in this exact moment. And maybe how you're feeling is a bit too much. And if we're not feeling okay, that tells our brain that maybe we're not safe. If we feel okay, that equals safe. If we don't feel okay, that equals unsafe. And because this part of our brain is responsible for our safety, if this part of our brain is convinced that we are not safe, your logic will have very little sway. Willpower will only get you so far. Imagine you were standing at a cliff face and you wanted to get down to the valley floor. Now you can take the stairs, which have a railing and are easy to navigate, or you can climb down. Now you don't need logic to know that you're gonna take the stairs. There is no way in hell you would climb down unless someone, unless something forced you to do it. And even then you'd be kicking and screaming. This is because your amygdala is taking responsibility for your safety and it will not let you do anything that puts you at risk, what it believes is a risk. And sometimes our amygdala is very accurate, very, very helpful. And sometimes the fear that we feel is not accurate for the situation that we are in. So when you get an email and it triggers your fight or flight response, it's not appropriate, but our amygdala doesn't know what an email is. It just knows that an email makes you feel unsafe. And therefore, emails must be bad. Therefore, we must try to avoid them. Because whatever makes you feel unsafe is bad and should be avoided. This part of our brain is very black and white. It's very simplistic. It's the animalistic part of our brain. And the reason why we attach such strong emotional connection to seemingly inconsequential things is because of something called emotional memory. You have had painful moments in your life that you have not processed and you have attached meaning to them. And typically the meaning we attach to these things is I'm not good enough. I'll be rejected. I won't belong. People will judge me. I'm gonna be incompetent. I'm stupid. I can't do this. I always make mistakes, I always mess things up, I always embarrass myself. People are gonna laugh at me. We attach all this meaning, and maybe we don't even remember the moment when that was created. But our nervous system does. Our amygdala does because it has emotional memory. Maybe the reason why emails trigger fear in you is because of expectation. Maybe you struggled in school, struggle to live up to the expectations, struggle to live up to standards, struggle to live up to what your parents wanted you to be. And when you took your report card home, there was this anxiety of they're gonna get mad at me, I'm gonna be punished, I'm not gonna, I'm gonna feel like I'm not good enough, like I'm never good enough. And the thing with that amigdala is it's not only responsible for our physical safety, it also is responsible for our emotional safety. Because when we feel emotionally safe, that's an indication that we are also physically safe. Because when we belong to a group of people, we are safer. The way our brain has developed is that we are safer in connection with other people than we are alone. Unfortunately for many of us, we have learned through many experiences, big and small, that we are not safe in connection with people. Essentially, this all comes down to safety. And this is why the conscious logical part of our brain, the part of our brain that has impulse control and willpower, will only win at using willpower against the amygdala for so long. It can all only hold out for so long. When it comes to your safety, if your brain is perceiving something as a threat, even if it's your own emotions, your amygdala will win every single time. It's very hard to force yourself to do something that your brain perceives as a threat. So what do we do to soothe this part of our brain to reassure it that I actually am okay, I'm safe. We need to start with the emotional memories, the different parts of us that feel unsafe, that get triggered. The part of you that feels not good enough, the part of you that feels like you're one step away from failing, the part of you that is afraid of rejection, the part of you that feels like you're constantly falling short. What we normally do with these parts is we judge them. We get frustrated at ourselves, we try to fix them or get rid of them because we think if I can just get rid of this, my life will be better. If I could just be freed from these burdens, everything will be okay. And then we think in order to do that, well, I just gotta do more. I just gotta try harder. I just gotta try more techniques and meditate more and go to more retreats. But all we're doing is we're still trying to escape. Those actions are still coming from our amygdala. They're still coming from a fear response of if I feel this, I'm not okay. So I gotta try and do something to get away from it. It's escape, it's flight. Or we fight it and we get really angry and frustrated at ourselves and we berate ourselves and put ourselves down. Or we just freeze, we numb out, we're exhausted, and we suddenly feel like we have no energy for anything or we don't want to do anything anymore. And we live in this constant state of push, pull, give up, because it's so exhausting, then pushing and pulling again. And I gotta say, running away feels good because running away looks like doing more, going to those retreats, reading all the books. And we're not trying to paint these as bad things, but we gotta identify where is this coming from? If anxiety is one of the driving forces behind why you're doing things, then it's coming from fear. And so when we work with these parts and we start to connect with them, rather than judge them, we get curious of why that part of us is actually there. Why do I have this fear that I'm not important or I'm not good enough? And going deeper than just the logical understanding of like, yeah, I understand why that. I understand that. I logically get that. Like, that's not enough. You need to truly connect to and understand that part of you. And I guarantee you just have a small piece of the pot puzzle with your logical understanding. It goes so much deeper. And that part of you really deserves to be truly deeply seen and understood and heard. And that's what that part of you actually really wants. But instead, we're just trying to learn and learn and learn and fix and fix and fix, and we're not slowing down to actually listen. It's like you share something that you're struggling with with a friend. And instead of that friend saying, Oh man, that sounds really hard, that sucks, and giving you a big hug and saying, I'm here for you. Thank you for sharing that with me. Instead, they go, Well, have you tried this? What about this? What if you did this? It sucks. It hurts, it's disappointing, and it's also frustrating. I've definitely had this kind of conversation with my husband before. I think it's a really typical conversation that comes up in relationships where one is super logical, the other one is quite emotional, and you're just not connecting. And I've definitely had to tell my husband before, I am not looking for your advice. I just want you to give me a hug and just validate what I'm feeling. And it took him a little bit, but he gets it now, most of the time. But this is how we start to process and let go of that pain and start to deactivate our overactive fight and flight response. This is how we start to get out of chronic stress. This is how we actually heal chronic skin picking and hair pulling and nail biting. Willpower is not gonna work. I'm pretty sure you understand that by this point. And you now know why willpower does not work. If you have a lion running towards you that clearly looks pretty hungry, are you just gonna run as fast as you can? Are you gonna stand there for a minute and just think about well, what should I logically do in this situation? No. No. You're going to act as fast as you possibly can to keep yourself safe and do well as you can in the moment to try and make good decisions. This is what's happening internally with the urge to pick. We feel threatened by our own emotions. We feel unsafe feeling our own emotions. And so we need to find a way to squish them and suppress them so that we can feel okay. This is what it means to get to the root cause, to go deep, to go inwards and address the parts of us that are really scared and hurting. Because we all, you're a human being, you've had hard experiences in your life. Even if you had a great childhood, you still had hard experiences. You still had things that you didn't get to process, you still have fears that you hold on to. And while they don't make sense in the context of your life right now, the emotional part of your brain has no sense of time. Whatever happened to you when you were six years old that hurt, that you didn't get to process, it feels like that's happening for you right now when you get triggered. No concept of time. Everything is right now in this moment. And so when you connect with those parts and work through and process and release that fear, then you're going to feel more calm, more present. You're going to feel more in control and grounded in yourself. And then through that, you're able to let go of the need for skin picking and hair pulling and nail biting. I believe willpower is really good to get us to have experiences that we're maybe nervous about, like going skydiving. We maybe need a little bit of willpower to get ourselves, to push ourselves over that hump. Or getting ourselves to the gym when we're just not feeling like it. Like that's a good time for some willpower. It's just a small moment. It's a small burst of like, let's do this. But then afterwards, there is a massive reward. You go skydiving, you feel amazing afterwards. I was, I'm not afraid of heights, but I was shitting myself when we were edging towards the edge of the plane door. I would have ran to the back of the plane and hid back there. Not a chance I would have gotten out of that plane. But willpower got me into the plane, and then the guy I was strapped to got me out of it. But willpower is really great for the push. And the reason why it works is because we get a reward afterwards. We feel good. We go to the gym, we feel like, yes, I went to the gym. I feel good about myself. We hold that speech, and afterwards, we're like, man, I'm proud of myself that I did that. We have that vulnerable conversation and then feel more connection to that person. Or we feel empowered in ourselves. That's the reward. But using willpower to get ourselves to stop a behavior that is actually existing to try and keep us safe, where's the reward in that? How does it make us feel good? We might have a moment of like, yes, I'm in control, but the fear is still there. All that emotion that skin picking, heppling, and nail biting has been helping us to suppress, it's still there. Where is the reward for our willpower, for that push that we gave ourselves? It's nowhere. Also, especially because we are probably criticizing ourselves and doubting ourselves, saying, Yeah, you did it this time, but what about tomorrow? What about later today? Like it's still not good enough. So quit it with the willpower. Learn to get curious of what is really going on. Get support in helping you to address those parts of you that are in there and are needing to be heard and understood and seen. Find a therapist or a psychologist or a coach that can help you to safely start to process those things. You can also work with me. This is what I do. This is the core aspect of the work that I do with my clients. And it's a lot more affordable than you think. So if you want to find out more about what it's like to work with me, click on the link in the show notes and send me a message about what inspired you to reach out and why you might like to work together. You are capable of healing. You are capable of living a fulfilling and satisfied life. You are capable of waking up in the morning and feeling well. The reality that you have right now does not have to be the reality that you live for the rest of your life. You were not born to struggle. You were born to be well. You were born to thrive. And I wholeheartedly believe that you can achieve that. Thank you so much for listening. Don't forget to hit like and subscribe. Leave a comment with your thoughts on this episode. Have a lovely rest of your week, and I will see you next week for the next episode of Beyond Skin Picking and Hair Pulling.