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Woman speaking on telephone twirling her hair. From "Contemporary Asian families in western settings. Leisure and life at home", PunchStock |
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Woman speaking on telephone twirling her hair. From "Contemporary Asian families in western settings. Leisure and life at home", PunchStock |
Do it again! |
| You can't stop picking your nose? You feel constantly pressed to run a strain of hair through your hand? To remove with your teeth some extra skin from your fingers? To stroke your beard without cessation? More people than you might believe suffer from difficult to control compulsive behaviors. In public we just see the tip of an iceberg. Much more of this kind of body-focused repetitive behavior (the clinical term is phaneromania), appears if people feel unobserved. Because in the back of their heads, they know they shouldn't do it. But why? Why do so many people feel pressed to do such evident nonsense? |
| Most of these obsessive habits appear as if they were intended to increase order in our outer appearance and to remove disturbing foreign bodies. However, a really satisfying final state is never reached. Somebody picking his nose would not be satisfied by reaching a final "clean state" by any alternative treatment. Likewise, perfectly ordered hair wouldn't prevent the hand from grasping a strain and shifting it to a "better position". It's the act in itself we cannot resist, not the result that attracts us. Also someone who twinkles his eyes more often than necessary to keep the cornea in a moistened state (about 20 blinks /min), is not aware of the futility of his act. None of these actions appearing to external observers more or less awkward, is an intentional act accompanied by explicit awareness of its causes and aims. |
| In most cases, stereotype unconscious behaviors are innocent and rated as whims or bad habits. They are very common. I'm not aware of any scientific inquiry, but probably you will not find any single human being completely devoid of it. People are chewing their cheeks, biting their nails, scratching their heads, fumbling with their fingers, poking their ears, licking their lips, cracking their knuckles, bouncing their legs, tapping their feet, grinding their teeth. I'm no exception (my personal obsessions are of no interest here...). Thus, any reader will immediately know what I mean, and the topic should be perfectly suited to illustrate some of the more subtle mechanisms at work in our mind. |
| Keeping our body in order - is that at the root of compulsive behaviors? We all learn to do that at an early stage of our development. During the first months of our life, mum or dad cleaned our arse for us several times a day. They urged us to blow our nose, they made us to take a bath, they combed our hair, they cut our nails. They repeatedly commented on these acts, mostly in quite affirmative terms. Apparently, they loved us more when we were clean. And now, as adults, some (if not all) of us still suffer from the afterglow of these first lessons in cleanness and orderliness. We never get things done really perfectly so, although we do our best. We do it again and again and again... |
| 7/05 < MB 7/05 > 7/05 psychoanalysis |
| C.-B. Zhong & K. Liljenquist (2006) Washing away your sins: Threatened morality and physical cleansing. Science 313:1451-1452. |
| Further reading: Der Standard 26. Juni 2016 |
| M Weygandt Mathis (2019) A new spin on fidgets. Nat Neurosci 22: 1614-16 |
| See also: What we are dreaming of |